Friday, March 31, 2006

Meeting Tests Unprepaired

I had a test tonight in my discrete math course. For those of you who have never had the joy of discrete math, it is everything you never wanted to know about counting, logic, predicate calculus, discrete probability, and graphing. Stuff like, how to translate logical statements into algebraic symbols, and then manipulate them. There's the fun of combinations and permutations, like how many different ways can can you pick 3 out of four numbers right in lotter.

This class is rough. I feel like I am failing, but compared to about 99% of the class, I'm doing better than ok. I dreaded the test tonight. I knew I wasn't as prepared as I should have been. All in all, I think I did well.

I talked a problem over with some folks from my class after the test, and now I have a burning issue to settle. One of the questions sounded VERY much like a pigeon-hole principal question. That is the math of common sense that says something like "Since there is only 12 months in a year, if you put 13 people in a room, you are guaranteed that at least 2 have the same birth month"

This same principle is used to determine that two people in New York City have the same number of hairs on their head. Anyway, the question dealt with unmated socks in a drawer. There was a dozen socks of each of these three colors brown, black, and blue. Since it is dark in the room, how many socks must a set of twins pull out to ensure two matching pairs of socks? I think that I messed up

No comments: