FEEDBACK ON MT181 EXAM 2017

Question 1:
This was done well. Almost all students noticed that polar coordinates should be
used, and correctly computed the four distinct solutions.

Question 2:
Many students gave a correct proof but also surprisingly many struggled to give a
proper proof. Logic itself was a main issue (c.f. comments on Question 5).

Question 3:
Most students correctly noticed that 111 and 57 are not coprime, which proves the
claim. Also part (b) was done well by most students.

Question 4:
This caused surprisingly big difficulties. The concepts of an injective, a surjective,
and of a bijective function are absolutely fundamental, and it is really important
to fully understand these concepts.
Some students were able to provide examples of such functions but have changed
the domains and codomains of the functions g, h and j, and hence changed the ques-
tion.

Question 5:
This was done well by the vast majority of the students.

Question 6:
It was nice to see that most students have well understood the concept of a reflex-
ive, a symmetric and of a transitive relation.

Question 7:
There is a general misconception as to what a proof is. There were quite a few
“proofs” of the following kind:

Statement A implies statement B

Statement B implies statement C
Statement C implies statement D
Now we know that statement D is true. Hence we conclude that statement A is
true, and therefore we have proved that statement A is true.

With this type of “proof” we can “prove” every statement. For instance we
“prove” that 0 = 1:

Date: June 11, 2017.

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2 FEEDBACK ON MT181 EXAM 2017

0 = 1 implies (by multiplying with 0 on both sides) that 0 = 0.

Now we know that 0 = 0 is true, and hence we have “proved” that 0 = 1.

Mathematics is based on the concept of proof. It is therefore vitally important

to understand what a proper proof is.

Question 8:
Not so many students properly remembered the ring axioms. But part (b), and (b)
(ii) in particular, were done quite well.

Overall the performance was quite satisfactory. Generally the algorithmic parts
caused less difficulties than questions that required understanding of concepts.