Hi reader, welcome to my SLOG, or "courSe LOG"(Ya, the acronym is a bit of a stretch). In these posts I will talk about my experience in CSC236, Introduction to the Theory of Computation at U of T. For my first post*, I thought the best thing to do would be to discuss my expectations entering this course, and how the course has or hasn't lived up to them.
To be completely honest, I wasn't very intimidated coming into this course. I've always been interested in math, and am doing a mathematics major along with my CS major. The biggest consequence of this would be that my (school) life now revolves around proofs, proofs and proofs! It was my hope that seeing them all day, everyday would help me to become somewhat competent at writing them.
The first two weeks of the course were pretty straightforward. Mathematical Induction, Complete Induction, I'd seen it all before. My first "huh" moment came in week 3, when we began studying the Well-Ordering Principle. After being introduced to it, my first thought was something along the lines of "Ok...so?". The principle itself was easy enough to understand, one of those obvious things you take for granted, but I couldn't figure out why this thing was important or how to use it to prove claims. After working through a couple examples, though, I think I'm beginning to see its use, particularly to make contradictions. Even in a theory course, it seems practice can be super helpful!
And with that, I wish you all well. Come back soon, I promise I'll write about A1 and my (mis)adventures with LyX.
-Jake
*Yes, I realize October might be a bit late for first impressions, but such is the life of a procrastinator. Also, it helped me to judge the course after actually doing work in it.
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