3.10, due on October 18

1. (Difficult) I don't know if I have ever seen this symbol notation before.  I think it's confusing, because the symbols look a lot like fractions.  I didn't follow the examples through, but I think they will be very helpful in helping me do any homework related to this section.
2. (Reflective) It is interesting that this section asserts that there is an easy way to solve the problem with computers, but still goes on to teach an alternate approach that is easier to do by hand.  That seems to be somewhat common in math.  For example, computers seem to be quite proficient at inverting matrices, but I think we spent quite a bit of time learning how to do so by hand in linear algebra.  I think learning to do things by hand can help us understand better how principles it math work, but I do appreciate that not being over-done.  Simply having confidence that a problem can be done by hand, given enough effort, is often enough.