Week 6

    Since it was the thanksgiving long weekend, there were only two lectures this week. I don't think there was a tutorial either. It's still midterm season so most of my time was spent focused on other courses and therefore, unfortunately, don't have much to say in this entry about CSC165. What I do remember is more proofs. The structure of proofs, including the indentation and reasoning, was stressed. Prof Heap went through five proofs. 

   

    First was a proof of non-Boolean functions, where rather than a true or false value, something such as a number is returned. The second one was using more of the definition. Both of these involved a statement involving the floor. I had no idea what that was so seeing its  symbols that looked like the absolute value |x| with legs kind of threw off the slight bit of confidence I'd built up about this course. Google always comes to the rescue though so now I'm okay with this.Third proof was about how to prove a false claim. Here we could negate the statement and then prove it which was pretty interesting and it would have taken me some time to figure out that approach on my own. Fourth, proof by cases wasn't so bad; it was a longer process but it made perfect sense. Lastly, the proof about limits was where he lost me for a good amount of time. I still need to review all the lecture notes to become more comfortable with everything. 

    

    Also, assignment 1 marks didn't turn out so well...which means I clearly need to work a lot harder. Assignment 2 was just posted and I haven't gotten a chance to look at. As much as I would love the challenge, it does make me nervous. Let's see how this one goes.  

Week 5

Monday morning, despite the fact that our first midterm was in two days, we moved forward into learning proofs. Although they might seem slightly confusing at some points, I enjoy the challenge. What I particularly like is how everything is layed out nicely in clear step by step transitions. Also, it isn't just a straight forward method you follow to prove every statement; you have to try out different directions, points of view, or you simply have to try to prove the existence (or lack of it). It enforces you to think differently and approach the problem from all angles. 

Tuesday, all I had for the day was the tutorial for this class at 9am that I rushed in and out from because today was the day I had to start (and finish) studying for the midterm exam the next morning. I was stressing, and all those posts on piazza did not help. They always make me feel like I'm much farther behind on my work while everyone is almost done. Not nice. Thankfully I was done going over everything fairly early in the night. I went to sleep not with not much confidence, thinking of how badly I might mess this up. Well I don't think I'm alone on this one...the exam was a huge relief. I'm sure all of us expected a rather difficult version that we'd all be clueless in and fail. 

I hope this pace continues.

TGIF

Week 4

This week we started off with transitivity, which wasn't too bad, but then we got to this graph that confused me so badly. Fortunately, it made more sense after I attended my calculus lecture. Coincidently those two classes had almost the same concept being conveyed. The last thing I remember learning was the introduction to proofs. For me this was the part of the week where I got more comfortable because proofs were something I'd done more than enough times in grade 8 and grade 9 in my school back in Dubai.

Outside of the three hours spent on lectures for this class was the time spent on our first assignment for this course. The first time it was posted and I looked at it...I closed the tab immediately thinking how on earth am I going to do this. Eventually I sat down one night and looked at it again. That time wasn't so bad and I finished most of the questions then and there. I still wasn't too sure of my solutions though. This uncertainty was the scariest part of this entire experience. What if I'm wrong? Everyone else seemed to have finished it so fast and so easily. Was I missing something? I didn't know what to do. Finally I replied to one of the posts on piazza about someone looking for a partner. We met up Friday afternoon, looked over just the first question together and both our solutions were completely different. Thats when we decided to go try the office hours...didn't work out so well. It was so crowded and Prof Heap didn't have time for us. So that was that. I came back home, looked over my solutions again and hit submit, putting all that stress to bed.