Robert’s blog

In line with my 2024 new year’s resolution, on November 26th I’ll be taking a course on financial investment principles offered by The University of Oxford and delivered by Konrad Kleinfeld.

There are two aspirations behind taking this course. The first one has to do with personal growth. And the second one with my professional aspirations. Addressing the former of the two, with the very first pay check one receives, there comes the responsibility of administering those acquired resources. I’ve never been formally introduced to finance, and I believe that knowing at least the basic aspects of it can help anyone greatly with this task we are all confronted with. Of course, one can live life spending all the money one makes in clothes, trips, technology, restaurants, you name it, but knowing there are other things out there to explore is what drew me to this course.

On the other hand, addressing the latter of the aforementioned aspirations, since I work in a bank, getting to know some of the technical vocabulary, and the inner workings behind how the business is conducted, could potentially propel my career, or at least help me build a stronger foundation onto which continue to build my future.

This semester I’m taking Discrete Mathematics (DM) and Introduction to Programming II (ITP2).

As for this week, I’ll be reading Chapters 1.1 and 1.3 from Rosen, K., & Rosen, K. H. (2011), Discrete mathematics and its applications., and solving the following exercises:

• pp.12 exercises 1–4.

• pp.13 exercises 5, 6, 8 (a, b, d, e, g and h), 9 (a, b, c and h), 10, 11, 13 and 14.

• pp.14: exercises 22–23.

• pp.15 exercises 32-37.

• pp.35: exercises 9, 30, 31 and 34.

I’ll also be reading Chapters 1.1 and 1.2 from Koshy, T. (2004), Discrete mathematics with applications., and solving:

• pp.17 exercises 3, 6, 9, 16, 19, 23, 25 and 31.

• pp.19 exercises 54–56,

• pp.29 exercises 3–7, 11 and 35–37.

On a personal note, the past few months went by in the blink of an eye. One day I was visiting Chile with my colleagues; another I was in Mendoza enjoying some well deserved holidays; what followed was me sitting for my Computational Mathematics exam and handing in my final assignment for ITP1; and the next thing you know I was visiting Ushuaia with some of my childhood friends.

Today was my first day as a freshman studying computer science at University of London. Therefore, I spent some time setting up my notebooks and writing down the important information for each course I’ll be taking, like bibliography, and the assessment method. These courses are: Introduction to Programming I (ITP1), and Computational Mathematics (CM).

I also came up with two lists to help me organise myself; one to keep my study time distribution present at all times, and another one to keep track of the week we’re in. The distribution of the following 22 weeks should look something like this today onwards:

• Monday: ITP1, 2 to 3 hours.
• Tuesday: CM, 2 to 3 hours.
• Wednesday: TP1, 2 to 3 hours.
• Thursday: CM, 2 to 3 hours.
• Friday: CM, 2 to 3 hours.
• Saturday: ITP1, 2 to 4 hours (only if necessary).
• Sunday: CM, 2 to 4 hours (only if necessary).

With this in mind what I want to achieve is 6 to 10 hours a week of study time for ITP1, and 8 to 13 hours a week for CM.

Additionally, I took notes on the ITP1 lectures for weeks 1 and 2, and solved all the exercises meant for those weeks.

Today I revised units 10 and 11 from the book on foundational mathematics, and also started watching the first lectures on the second course of the Object-Oriented Programming Specialization.

These units covered simpler topics, namely, transposing formulae, and a general definition of what an equation is, how to solve them, how to go about quadratic equations, and strategies for systems of equations.

So far unit 9 from the book on foundational mathematics has been the one that took me the longest to complete.

This unit went over the algebra behind expressing single factions as the sum of two or more simpler fractions (partial fractions).

It is an interesting topic, it really is, but going over all of the exercises was a time consuming task.