Week3 SLOG

   In this week, 2 new symbols were introduced, conjunction and disjunction. It is interesting that the meanings of 'and' and 'or' in mathematics languages are different from those in our daily languages. And that also reminds me to pay more attention to the meaning of 'and' and 'or' in further studies. I found that negation was a tricky part. Understanding the logic is crucial to negate the statement; therefore, I felt a little challenging to do the negation. However as I practice more, I can gradually understand the method. During the lecture, I also learned several laws that were useful in analyzing the statement; and they are very similar to those in math. Though I'm still not feeling quite comfortable with language of math, I will pay more attention to tutorials and work harder :)

week 1&2 SLOG

   In the first week, I learned the relation between mathematics and programming and how to express an idea efficiently through mathematics languages. I also learned that computer languages must be extremely precise while human languages can be ambiguous. At first, it was a little challenging for me to understand the logic, so I was struggling with translating human languages into computer languages. However, I found that Venn diagrams were really helpful to understand the computer languages since they visualize the statement. Especially when I learned the universal and existential quantifiers, Venn diagrams gave me better understanding of the difference between those 2 quantifiers and how they work.

    As I reviewed the lecture slides and notes, I got better understanding of and felt more comfortable with computer languages in the second week. In this week I learned Predicates and Implications, which are commonly used in computer languages. In this week many mathematics notations were introduced and used frequently. I found that what I have learned in this class was related to my calculus class, which made me understand the concepts better. What made me feel interested was to find the assumptions and conclusions in everyday languages during the lecture. It was fun to analyze and figure out the implication relations; and my biggest achievement was that I got all the “finding P and Qs” right.