Section 4.2 pgs 138-144, Due November 7, 2011

1. What was the most difficult part of the reading for you?
Well, first, I must say that while I didn't follow everything in today's reading, it felt worlds better than reading the end of chapter 3. So... hooray. In terms of difficulty, I'll mention a few short things. Do you know that feeling you get when you're listening to somebody (usually a fast talking girl) tell a really long story that has a lot of characters that you're unfamiliar with? At first you really try to keep track of where everybody is in the story so that you can respond appropriately to the punch line? Well, that head-spinning feeling (at first you are okay, but somewhere in the middle you completely lost track but don't want to say anything because you don't want to hurt her feelings) is kind of what I felt tonight. I felt like the proof of Chebychev's estimate was like trying to listen to that girl tell a story. It was a little too long and introduce a few too many new ideas for me to stay caught up. But, as I said, it doesn't feel hopeless. I'm guessing that just a simple explanation/verbalization of some of those "greatest integer" things will be very helpful. Also, I struggled with that "O" business.


2. What was the most interesting part of the reading for you?
(By the way, I'm sorry again for my test blunder... It was a long weekend and I wasn't thinking clearly. But, I did spend most of my Saturday and Sunday preparing for this coming test, so hopefully things'll start looking up) What I found most interesting in this reading was something that you mentioned in class. Mostly, the probability of these large numbers being prime. It reminded me of that Birthday Paradox (I'm sure you've heard of) and how, though (using the book's example) .005% is not a very high percentage, it seems high in context of looking at an 86 digit number and asking if it's prime or not. I mean, 86 digits is a HUGE number, so to have that percent chance of picking a prime seems pretty remarkable. I would have thought that primes were much more sparse than that.