> Especially in math. Math is a skill hierarchy, and if you cannot execute a lower-level skill consistently and accurately, you will not be able to build more

> Especially in math. Math is a skill hierarchy, and if you cannot execute a lower-level skill consistently and accurately, you will not be able to build more advanced skills on top of it. To be frank, I am only a math hobbyist and studying CS. I haven't taken any proof based courses (only calc 3, linear algebra). However, it is my experience that once you get the initial proof based stuff down and are familiar with common proof writing techniques, you can pretty much learn anything. I often start on an nLab page for a mathematical structure and just click on links in the definition till I see something I know. I then try and make sense of it and go back up the chain. I try to solve some problems and see some invariants. If I want to go more in depth I watch lectures on youtube and then read a book about it and do some more problems. I'm not really sure if this is a top down or bottom up process, but it seems more top down to me. Of course, if I encounter a whole field I don't know then I need to start from scratch and go bottom up. This is also for essentially a late-undergrad math major understanding of topics at most.