Robert’s blog

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.

It took me a little bit longer than I had actually expected because, yesterday, a friend dropped by and we spend the whole afternoon chatting, but today I completed all the exercises I had remaining from unit 8 of the book Foundation Maths, 7th edition, that is part of the recommended bibliography for Computational Mathematics.

I also completed the first course of the Object-Oriented Programming Specialization that we, students joining as part of the spring 2024 cohort, were gifted, and were encouraged to take.