How to Understand Discrete Math

Video Transcript

"So how do you understand discrete math? Ewwe! Hi, I'm Jimmy Chang. I've been teaching college math for nearly a decade and we're here to just discuss a couple things on how you can understand discrete math. Now we that discrete math sounds like a very complicated subject and it actually is. It's very broad. It covers a wide variety of topics. But one thing that will definitely help you understand how discrete math work is understand where its uses are. There's a lot of different areas believe it or not where discrete math is used. Probability is a good area that discrete math is used a lot in... game theory, graph theory. Being able to figure out the shortest route between point A to point B. Once you figure out where it's used, it's very important to go back and understand the terminology and the principles behind it. With a lot of courses, believe it or not, not just math, it's all about the definitions. It's very important that you understand what the terms mean and what principles are involved and uses those terms. And the last thing, is understand the link between what you just learned from a terminology perspective and just see exactly where they're used. Where is a particular area used in game theory? You can see where the terms are used in computer programming which uses discrete math a lot. But once you figure out, A, where discrete math areas are used, B, what the terminology is, you can connect those two parts and figure out exactly how they're all connected to each other. And once you can make that real world connection, you can definitely see the uses for discrete math, which will help you understand it better. So, I'm Jimmy Chang and that's how you understand discrete mathematics."