Week the Fourth

I've come to a conclusion: recursion is a bloody pain in the arse (though, admittedly, a rather beautiful one if done right.)

This, however, has nothing (yet?) to do with CSC165. It's quite possible that most of these ramblings won't, because this post is a week late and will therefore probably manage to center itself on the reason of lateness (aka the comp sci test we had yesterday morning, which involved - you guessed it! - recursion!! Grumble.)

Ah, what I'd give to be a Time Lord....

But I'm not. Moving on. This (well, last) week we talked about Limits, and Proofs (and probably a lot of other things that I may have forgotten to write down.)

Taking a Limit, apparently, is like waging a dismal, complex, one-turn war against your horrendously evil arch-nemesis, in which they try to make you look ridiculous by picking an epsilon which gives you a seemingly-impossible target, and you in turn laugh in their face with maniacal glee as you cleverly choose a delta in response that crushes their hopes as efficiently as dropping a one-ton brick on a piece of packing foam (which is to say, completely.) At least, that's the gist I got. It also gives a whole new meaning to "nice guys finish last" - after all, if you're the 'nice' guy picking the delta you'd better ensure you're choosing after the epsilon is set by your dashingly evil alter-ego. (as Danny eloquently put it: "Switching epsilon and delta: that is DEADLY. Don't. Do. It.") And that was, as far as my memory allows, the majority of Wednesday's lecture.

On Friday, we began fluttering about the topic of Proofs. I say 'began' to hopefully signify that I know close to nothing about this so far, and therefore have very little to say on the subject beyond the fact that apparently the TA's and Danny will be pickier with our structuring of the proof than Python running a Pep8 on a file (which is to say, excessively so.) Beyond that, I'll relay, as always, some of Danny's insights:

During our first proof of the course (n odd implies n^2 odd): "I inevitably get asked, 'Sir, what's your definition of an even number?'...as if it's up to me!" well, he said that, but he still gave us a darn good definition (even num = 2*n, odd = 2*n +1)

About proofs in general: "Some students come to me and say: 'I'm not really comfortable proving this; can't I use logic?' And that's great, because it implies 'Hey, here we have proofs, and over there we have logic, and they have NOTHING to do with each other!' " (They do. Hence the course. Oh Danny, thank god you have a sense of humor.)

And finally, for a bit of fun: "Impatience: the second cardinal rule of programmers." Which leads me back to thinking of CSC148, but hey, it was bound to happen. Thank god that test is over though. Now to worry about the one tomorrow for this course! Thankfully, I'm feeling relatively confident so far. We'll see how it goes, I suppose. Cheers!