Week 3 - Jan 29, 2013

I missed the tutorial this week since I was sick.  Luckily the my TA sent me a copy of the quiz and the professor provided the solution.  I was happy to find that the solution I found was indeed correct.

I don't really have much to say about this past week, except that so far I feel fairly comfortable with the course material.  The professor posted a PDF on the course website which contains many problems along with the solutions.  I have been working on those problems and found them very helpful in getting me used to the material, especially when it comes to concepts that I'm not sure I understand.

I have also completed the first assignment which is due this Wednesday.  At first glance it seemed a little daunting, however after I worked on the problems from the PDF above I found the assignment to be fairly straight forward.  I am very comfortable with negation, implication and laws of distributivity and associativity and such.  The only thing I can say that I am not one hundred percent comfortable with is when we are translating a statement from English into symbolic language.  For the most part I don't have a problem with it, however sometimes it can be difficult as English sentences are sometimes quite vague.  The professor had said in class that this problem is quite common and that most people find translating English to symbols more difficult then the converse.

At this point, since I've understood most if not all the material covered so far, I am feeling very eager to tackle proofs.  As I've stated in my first post, I have seen proofs before, but when they were introduced to me we had never gone through all the symbols and concepts at the foundation of proofs which we have done in this course.  Since I understand the fundamentals now, I am very confident that this time around I will understand what it is that I am doing when it comes to proofs.