First Week - Simple Induction

Fall 2008's offering of CSC 236 began with a lecture on the principle of simple induction. Its premise is that if the intial case works, and each case implies its successor, then all cases work. Professor Heap covered a few examples in class, which were a nice review. This was a topic covered in CSC 165, though it seems to have a much greater focus in this course, and the rigid structure of proofs has been relaxed, to a point. 

The lectures on Wednesday and Friday followed a very similar format, with more examples of simple induction. However, on Friday I was a bit surprised to see a simple induction proof mixed in with proof by cases; I had not thought of mixing the major types of proofs together, but on reflection, it's good that we can, as the example in class (for all natural numbers n, the last digit of 3 to the exponent n ends in either 1, 3, 7 or 9) required cases for a succinct proof. 

In terms of material, this week proved to be a bit boring, as it was mostly review. However, I was glad for the amount of time spent on it, especially in the formal write ups, since they allowed me to see the kind of proofs that we, students, ought to be writing.