SLOG Entry #3 Feb 3, 2013 (Week 3)

My third SLOG post concerns the tutorial and lectures in week 3. While negation was a concept I had learned in calculus, the reason for why a universal quantifier becomes and existential one and vice versa when negating was not really told to us. For this reason, I was very happy that Professor Heap went into detail about what it means to negate a statement. Yet again, his practical example made great sense; in order to negate a universal statement you need to find a counterexample. A single counterexample is sufficient and so an existential quantifier followed by the negation of the implication is the correct negation.

Furthermore, I found the commutative, associative and distributive laws to be very interesting. The commutative and associative laws make sense even without knowing much about logic but the distributive law was a little harder to grasp. However, once we applied our knowledge about Venn diagrams and truth tables, it became understandable. At first, I tried remembering the laws exactly as they were but I found it must easier to just remember basic rules and derive the laws from those rules.

Lastly, I was very pleased to see a more difficult tutorial this week. The problems in the handout were challenging this time and it was my first time using multiple quantifiers in one statement so it really called upon my intuition. At the time, I disagreed about the answers for question 2, but my TA eventually convinced me that I was wrong and I was happy to correct my flawed view. This week was extremely productive, I feel like I learned much more than last week and that my hunger for an intellectual challenge was satisfied.