3rd week journal

This week, we learnt more symbols of the language of Math. ‘And’ and ‘or’ are two words that we use very often in daily life. In math, ‘and’ is called conjunctions, which has a similar meaning to natural language. ‘Or’ is called disjunctions and has a different meaning from natural language. In natural language, we usually give two choices and use ‘or’ to connect them, this is an exclusive or. But in language of math, ‘or’ is an inclusive or. Negation is easy to express when it is in natural language because I just need to add a ‘not’, but it becomes a bit more complicated when it comes into language of math. Since adding a negation to a sentence with a combination of conjunctions, disjunctions and implications, we need to apply laws to change it properly.

It’s hard to memorize all the laws, and understanding the laws will make me remember them better and longer than just memorizing them. To me, using different examples is the easiest and most efficient way to understand the laws.  From my experience from PHL245(modern symbolic logic), practice is the key. I am going to do lots of practice during the weekend. And I found out that the interaction in class is pretty important too. Because it will help me to think more if I interact more in class.