Slog for Week 4

    In week 4, the professor Larry Zhang went over bi-implication, transitivity, and mixed quantifiers. At the beginning of the lecture, he began the lecture with explanation of why p => q equals to ㄱp  or q: because two statement have the same truth table. His explanation made me understood since I had not understood why those statements are equivalent. By knowing the concept, I have become to be flexible in many other questions related to it. Now I am familiar with De Morgan's Law, implication law, and so on.

   Also before I listened the lecture on Tuesday, I was not sure why the order of universal quantification and existential quantification makes difference, but now I have the idea why switching x and y, which are quantified, makes different statements. For example, the statements of 'For every women, there is a man who is her soul mate,' and 'There is a man, every woman is his soul mate.' have exactly different meaning by only switching the place of x and y. 

  Even though I understand most of lecture, there was the part I can hardly understood. In mixed quantifiers, the professor went over two mathematical examples, but I could not follow since I have no idea from the beginning of the example. I expected to get the ideas of similar questions from the tutorial, but we just did problems about bi-implication that I already had plenty of ideas.

   I might going to try to find the similar examples from the past tests that the professor put on the lecture slide, and to be able to solve them with many practices. 

 

Slog for Week 3

    For this week, the professor Larry Zhang went over the concepts of conjunction, disjunction, negation, and truth tables. Actually the parts of conjunction and disjunction were not that hard since it is easy to transfer from English language to symbols. I only need to be careful when the difference of uses of conjunction 'and', between the meanings of 'the actual and 'union'. Except these, nothing was difficult.
    Contrast to conjunction and disjunction, negation was hard for me. For example, I have no idea how and why the symbol of 'and' changes to the symbol of 'implies to'. I was trying to understand it by looking and finding in course notes, and websites, but I still do not get the concept at all. I believed I probably get some help on this concepts in tutorials, which I had today, but sadly it makes me more confused.
    In order to understand the negation part, I believe I need to go office hour on next week, which might be solve my problems. Moreover I think only understanding lecture slides is not enough, so that I need to find the problems relating to lecture from the website that I can work on.

Slog for Week 1 and Week 2

    For Week 1 and Week 2, the professor Larry Zhang went over the concepts of precision, problem solving and quantifiers, sentences, statements, predicates, and implications. Generally the lecture in Week 1 was not that difficult, because the way to solving problems and quantifiers such as universal quantification and existential quantification are the concepts I already used to it from my mathematical experience.
    However, the lecture I had in this week was not easy as the lecture in Week 1. Even though the part of 'quantifiers as claims about sets' was quite understandable since most of quantifiers are shown in Mathematic quite often, predicates and implications were terribly confusing concepts that were brand new for me. Firstly, I could not understand why does the example sentence, "x is a prerequisite of y" become to P(x,y). Secondly, I struggled to finding P and Q in the everyday language sentences, which the professor went over during lecture 2.3. First half of sentences were not that difficult although rest of them were really confusing. For example, from the sentence, "I will go only if you insist," I do not get why 'I will go' is P but not Q. In my way, I considered 'you insist' as Q because 'If you insist, then I will go' seems right rather than 'If I will go, then you insist.' Lastly, in equivalence, it was challenged to get the concepts the meanings of signs => (which means P only if Q ) and <= (which means P if Q).
    In order to overcome these difficulties, I have read the course notes that are relevant to content of lecture slides, and search additional information related to concepts throughout the internet, of course using reliable sources from university websites such as lecture notes from other universities. Also I found more examples of each concepts, especially predicates and implications, which are the hardest part I am struggling to.
    From the lectures of Week 1 and Week 2, I now decide to read the lecture notes prior to each lecture, and print the lecture slides before the lecture too. Listening lecture with some background knowledge from lecture notes might be helpful to understand the materials better, so that I will definitely do that from next week.