Week 1 & 2

This is the start of my SLOG to record my experiences in CSC165. This is also my first time writing a blog post.

It has only been two weeks since school started but I have gotten into school-mode faster than expected. Hopefully I will be able to keep up my study habits throughout the year and handle all of my courses.

In terms of CSC165, we've learned about things such as universal and existential claims. We also learned how to solve mathematical problems by following George Polya's four steps and were also given some puzzles to solve. The material has not been very difficult so far but interesting nonetheless. I am looking forward to learning about proofs and program run times. Something new I learned this week was set and list comprehension in Python. It is a very useful and concise way to generate sets in a single line while also being readable at the same time. For example, the following code returns the set of numbers in set S that are even:

 S = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}  
 {x for x in S if x % 2 == 0}

We also had our first tutorial and quiz this week which went well. The TA took up the problems on the problem set and helped clarify some of the problems I had. The quiz was very similar to the problems from the homework and I look forward to these tutorials in the future. Also, tutorials end 30 minutes early so that was a pleasant surprise.

I was looking through some of the SLOGs from my classmates and one that I found interesting was here: http://fmello.com/Blog/csc-165-slog-wk1. He provides a table with the definitions and examples for a few of the mathematical symbols we will be using in this course like the quantifiers and operators. This blog is also very nice to look at and designed very well and responsive, so hats off to whoever it is that wrote that blog!

I hope to benefit from writing these logs and maybe it will even inspire me to create a personal blog of my own.