Bye bye Sem 1 2010/2011

Once again, I should pen down my thoughts of the modules I have read in the past semester. Currently, I am trying to work my way through Marcus' Number Fields. It is a painful battle because there are so many questions I am unclear about and the only way to clear my doubts is to read more materials. I guess that was similar to how I had struggled through Galois Theory.

CS3231 - Theory of Computation
The content of CS3231 was pretty interesting. It started off with DFA/NFA then followed by CFL/PDA and last but not least Turing machines. However, I am a little disappointed in the sense that we did not touch on complexity theory which was the thing that interests me. I guess I have to find some time to take CS5230 to learn more about complexity theory. Close to the final exams for CS3231, I could feel myself losing interest in the module and my results surprised me.

CS3234 - Logic and Formal Systems
CS3234 has a heavy emphasis on COQ and it was a painful battle to master COQ (I spent a lot of time on the COQ assignments). I must say I have no idea of what I am doing in COQ. I just prove things in COQ by following the Zen. Just like CS3231, I lost steam as the final exams drew near and hence my results surprised me too.

GEK1045 - Introduction to World Religion
The approach for GEK1045 was to compare between religions (not in terms of which religion is correct but more of their differences and similarities). The lectures were pretty boring but the tutorials were rather interactive. I like the tutorials because I didn't need to prepare anything and love to listen to other's conservative views.

MA4203 - Galois Theory
I must say Galois Theory was the most exciting module I had for the semester. Most of my Thursday nights were spent rushing the tutorials for MA4203 (We are supposed to submit either softcopy or scanned copies of our solutions to the tutorial the night before the tutorial on Fridays). I spent a lot of time reading up on the material on my own. It feels weird that I managed an A+ for this module as I didn't fulfill its prerequisite which was Algebra II. The finals was crazy. I felt that there was simply too many questions (and sub-questions) and too little time (Who says 2h 30min is enough?).

MA4247 - Complex Analysis II
I had thought that MA4247 will enrich me on topics that are more related to number theory but I guess I was disappointed. Riemann's zeta function was never discussed in the module. In some sense, this module uses a more geometric approach as opposed to how it was done in MA3111. The final paper was crazy. It consist of 2 sections - section A (60%) and section B (40%). I finished section A in like 1h 15min and spent the rest of my time on section B (which consist of choosing 2 questions out of 3 questions). At the end of 2h 30min, I came to a conclusion that I cannot do any of the 3 questions. What a terrible revelation.