Wake Up It Is CSC165!

Welcome everyone to my newly established weekly blog on Mathematical Expressions and Reasoning! To make this course sound even more high tech as soon to be Computer Scientists should do, we must include numbers. So let`s try that again, welcome fellow bloggers and TA`s to the CSC165 blog!

What a two weeks it has been especially for us first years! Hustling and bustling to get to class, feeling like a speck in classes filled with hundreds of students while feeling absolutely dumbfounded when the professors take their articulate speaking to a whole new level.

CSC165 is quite different from the introduction to programming course (CSC108) in that it actually requires you to think outside the box; logically and smartly. It is one of those courses which can tie your brain in knots if you do not understand the language used. On the other hand CSC108 is a more straightforward and hands on course.

We now arrive at the dreaded Sets! Sets! Sets! The topic that I have not done in six years and never really knew its application until a full two weeks of it in CSC165. The first week was basically determining whether a claim was true or false about sets. In other words this is known as quantification. In order to prove quantified claims as true or false we should take into consideration two main things:

     1. In order to prove a universal claim as true, there should be no counter examples.

     2.  In order to prove a universal claim as false, at least one counter example should be identified.

Now on to the famous interconnected topics of Implication, Converse and Contrapositive which were all touched on in both weeks 1 and 2. These topics in particular completely baffled my mind because they are unlike anything that I have done before. You would think by doing Computer Science, you would relieve yourself from English, but boy I was wrong! If I have to describe these topics, I would refer to them as a form of twisted logic. In order to express implication, P must imply Q.

For example if you have this sentence: If you do your homework, you will pass all your exams.

The implication for this sentence is: If you do your homework (P), you will pass all your exams (Q).

The converse of this sentence is: If you passed all your exams (Q), you did your homework (P).

The contrapositive of this sentence is: If you did not pass all your exams (if not Q), you did not do your homework (then not P).

What were your experiences like for the two weeks in CSC165 so far?

Comment  below!