More on Proofs and Intro to the Big O

    This week in class we wrapped up our discussions on proofs, finishing with a slide on allowed inferences. Nothing too challenging, this covered some of the more obvious inferences we may make in our proofs, however it was certainly worth going over.  On Wednesday, Prof. Heap introduced the somewhat perplexing concept of sorting and the big O. The idea of counting steps and comparing functions based on their rates of change is not exceptionally difficult for me, though I do fear this will become much harder.

    Unfortunately, I believe that I performed quite poorly on this week's quiz in tutorial. The proof we were asked to do was not that difficult but I erased my first answer thinking I got it wrong. At this point I realized that I was initially correct but did not have enough time to re-write my original solution. This was incredibly disappointing to me but I will try not to worry too much about a quiz worth only around 1% of my final mark.

    This week I have also began work on Assignment #2. So far, I have only decided which statements I will need to prove and disprove and brainstormed some ideas on how to go about doing this. Claims 1.2 and 1.3, being close to the form of the epsilon-delta definition of a limit, were quite interesting for me to think about. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my newly acquired knowledge from MAT137 on this type of proof has helped me approach these claims with much confidence, allowing me to see the fun in proving or disproving. I predict that I will have minimal difficulty with the creative aspects of these proofs, being only annoyed with the tedium of their structures.