Aside from the part about "bitch", I agree with pretty much everything zackattack said. Key points: 1. On your second exposure, things will make MUCH more sens

Aside from the part about "bitch", I agree with pretty much everything zackattack said. Key points: 1. On your second exposure, things will make MUCH more sense. It's just how I've found the mind works. The first time you read something, you're reaction is: what??? Come back to it in a few days and you feel more comfortable with it. 2. When I first started reading proofs, I felt so clueless as to _why_ they were doing the steps that they were. Basically, I felt like I was trying to scale a sheer cliff that was smooth as glass, with no handholds. I had no idea where to _start_ if I wanted to prove something. However, after reading a lot of proofs, you start to understand some tricks, concepts, and approaches on how to tackle them. 3. Going from concrete --> abstract (i.e. generalizing) is the way to go. As zackattack said, always try to work out cases in lower dimensions, or even "trivial" cases. After doing one or two of those, it's a lot easier to guess at the general form and verify that, than to derive the general form from the get-go. Also, doing the lower-dimension case will help you build _intuition_. Mathematics is all about formalizing intuition. The symbols and equations will often obscure that, but always try to understand the concept behind what the equation means. That will make most proofs much more amenable to understanding.