The last week of classes has been crazy for me with 3 different assignments due (this slog being one) and knowing that in less than a week, I will be writing my first exam has made it even worse.
One of the remaining 2 assignments was assignment 3 for csc165. And now that it is done, I can look back and reflect upon what I did. I don’t intend to write a detailed exclusive post of assignment 3 as I did for assignment 2 (don’t know why, just don’t feel like it, I guess). However, there is something that came up on assignment 3 that I would like to discuss:
Limits !!!!!
Limits have come up quite a lot in all calculus courses I have taken so far (which are not that many); they came up in high school calculus, 1st year university differential calculus and 1st year University integral calculus. And although in each of these courses we have extensively studied techniques to manipulate these limits and get all sorts of answers, we have not talked about what they actually mean as much. Sure, there would be a section of the book talking about deltas and epsilons, and the professor would discuss what they mean in 3-5 minutes, but at the end we always hear that we “don’t need to know them for the test” or that we “don’t really need to worry about them unless [we] want to major in math.” And therefore the meaning of limits is taught extensively in only these math courses that prepare students to be math majors.
In short, I was taught to solve the limit but not to interpret it.
In csc165, the definition of limits came up at the very beginning of the course when we were just talking about ∀ and ∃. Lately, it has come up again and been linked to determining the algorithms’ complexity.
In csc165, we have spent lots of time trying to understand what a limit means and to visualize it using graphs.And now that I understand what a lim of x going to infinity means, I think it is quite great that stuff we are taking in cs can link back to stuff we took in calculus courses.
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