Saturday, September 6, 2014

2.1-2.4, Due September 8

Difficult: The most difficult part for me to understand is a lot of the notation. I am used to reading P(x)=2x+2, but is that equivalent to P(x) : 2x+2? I know the first one is an equation, but is the second one a set, or just an expression? Or also a function?

I understood a lot of the vocabulary, but I am still not sure why P => Q can be read "P only if Q." Suppose P was "You are happy." and Q was "You clap your hands," then the conditional statement is "If you are happy, then you clap your hands".

Well, now I just typed up and deleted a whole paragraph about why that didn't make sense... but then after thinking about it, it does. I guess it's just tough to understand right off the bat all those six ways of saying conditional statements, particularly "only if", "is sufficient for", and :"is necessary for"

Reflective: This whole reading section brought me back to geometry class where we did a lot of proofs. I remember the inverse, converse, and contrapositive of statements and remember learning about "iff" (if and only if). This chapter, logic, is really interesting because it doesn't just apply to math, but easily correlates to any subject you are learning, or life in general. Doctors, lawyers, and computer technicians use it all the time. If the bone is fractured, then we will put it in a cast. We use these statements, determine their truth value, and connect them to our lives multiple times per day.

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