week 1 and 2

The first week of class started with an introduction, breaking down the name of the course; mathematical expressions and reasoning. An important component to this would be the mathematical expressions which can be communicated in several ways, using words and numbers, words and letters representing symbols and a pure symbolic representation of a problem. It was also mentioned that communication in general, such as, working in a team, analyzing problems, expressing problems, understanding problems etc. would be important in general and we would look at precise ways to communicate such as with proofs and in the computer. To add to communication, there was talk of precision; how you can either be precise or ambiguous when communicating. I found it interesting that you can be extremely precise by limiting the field that the information is relevant to, for example, math has specific terminology. I also learned that computers need extreme precision whereas humans can lean more towards the ambiguous side when communicating.  In the second week we learned more about quantifiers. I found it interesting with how specific you could be with simple words such as, "all", "every", "some", "there is" and that sentences and statements could be indicated as different by having a quantifier in it and could be either true or false. I didn't think of language as being this specific. I found the Venn diagrams helpful to visualize except I kept having issues with placing the x and o in the correct spot at first, when I went to tutorial and we went over the first exercise, I got a better grasp for how the circle and x was placed.