Monday, 13 February 2012

TMA addiction

I am currently making good progress with the TMA's because I can't stop doing the questions. I keep thinking that I'll put the question paper away for a bit and get on with some more reading but I can't help having a little look at the next unanswered question. I tinker around with it and before I know it I am fleshing out the whole answer. So TMA02 is done and I will post it off today and I have already completed a couple of questions from TMA03.

I had the first part of TMA01 back today and I was pleased to get 35/35 but I am slightly worried that I might have messed up something in the equivalence relation question in part 2. I have been learning a bit more about equivalence relations from the discussions on the forum and there was some discussion about whether you needed to have the reflexive condition or not. I tried to think of examples where a relation is symmetric and transitive, but not reflexive, but I found it hard to do. The trick, apparently, is to have an element of a set that is not related to any other element, including itself. I think equivalence relations are whole topic in itself and I could spend hours getting bogged down in it (which I don't intend to do!).

5 comments:

  1. Careful Duncan you are in danger of peaking to soon :). Still I admit doing TMA's is preferable to slogging through definition after definition.
    Well done for first part but then i would expect no less from your thorough approach.

    Best wishes Chris

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    1. Yes, I know what you mean. The danger is that I will get to the point where I haven't got any more course to do, so I switch off and go to sleep! Doing things this way has been different to the way I worked for 121 and 221. Then I would do the TMA just after I had read the book. This way I do get a sort of fresh look at a subject the second time around, so perhaps it is beneficial. Maybe by the time I do the preparation for the exam, the third go at the material will finally help to cement it into my leaky old brain.

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  2. PS reflexivity is needed to distinguish between x <= x and x < x the first is true and so reflexive but the second is obviously not. Hope this helps

    PS I'm not a robot

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    1. Yes, I see what you mean. Perhaps equivalence relations is something to study after M208 is finished. I was wondering about their application to number theory.

      Never crossed my mind that you were a robot!

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  3. No but every time I post I get asked to prove I'm not a robot by entering a word so I thought I would reassure you :)

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