The textbook has chosen to represent relations with the capital letter R. This would make sense because the word starts with an R. However, it is still confusing to me. I see the capital R and it is between other letter variables and it is just a little confusing. I appreciated in Wednesday's lecture that Prof. Jenkins used the "star" symbol instead of the R. This seems to make more sense and I actually make the quick substitution in my head when doing the reading. This helps a little bit. The subject matter in pretty complicated for me, so having this R issue just adds to the problem. Kind of minor, but I wish the text would have been more intuitive like the lecture.
I never really noticed it before, but I now see the fundamental importance of relations in mathematics. Sure, since first learning arithmetic, we solve problems that are equations. I've taken these relations-problems for granted, but it is interesting that we are focusing on the relations now in this class. Equivalence relations seem to make sense, for the most part, especially when relating it to other math I've done involving equalities. That familiarity helped with the comprehension of the reading. It was good to grasp that because the rest of the material was a little hard to follow, as I mentioned in the first part of the post. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's lecture to learn the material better - the lectures always help.
No comments:
Post a Comment