Week 1-2

Coming to my first lecture last Monday I honestly had no idea what to expect from this course. I understand that ‘reasoning’ is one of the main aspects of creating a program, but at first the idea of having a whole course about this subject seemed a little daunting.  Thankfully, after the first lecture the idea of a course revolving around mathematical reasoning seamed a little bit less intimidating.  Yes, I did say a little bit because after all there still were a few concepts that gave me a little trouble during the first two weeks.

   

      Venn diagrams, two circle that intersect each other creating a common area, such a simply concept! That is until they started describing the relationship of two functions.

Yes, at first this concept of translating a relationship into a simple Venn diagram was a little frustrating, and left me completely confused.  After the Friday lecture of last week, I got on my computer and reviewed my notes and had absolutely no idea the reason for the x’s and o’s in the diagram. Although I was still unsure I decided it was time to start the first tutorial assignment, and to my surprise found question 1 extremely easy.  Now that I was finally thinking I understand, I started question 2, and it completely stops me in my tracks. Once again I found myself not understanding what to do, or really what was asked of me. Finally, Tuesday of this week came around and it was time for my tutorial. Let me just start by saying that going to tutorial cleared everything up, and was extremely helpful. Coming out of the tutorial I realized how simple the concept was, and understood how to represent statements proving them to be true or false.

Afterwards, I decided to take another look at different examples from the course slides to make sure I fully understood this concept. After finishing 3 or 4 examples from the lecture slides I can finally say that not only was I able to fill in the Venn diagram, I also fully understood them. I must say being able to find the solutions was extremely satisfying, and makes me extremely excited to solve the problems to come! Till next week!