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Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused. It's our natural state of being, and it's okay to keep going and take what insights you can. I suggest you do
by j2kun 13y ago
Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused. It's our natural state of being, and it's okay to keep going and take what insights you can.
I suggest you don't worry too much about verifying every claim and doing every exercise before moving on. If it takes you more than 5 or 10 minutes to verify a "trivial" claim in the text, then you can accept it and move on. It's healthy, if you get stuck on such a problem, to think about other problems or come back to them later. It's not uncommon to find that by the time you revisit them you've literally grown so much (mathematically) that they're trivial.
- vsbuffalo 13y ago> Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused. It's our natural state of being, and it's okay to keep going and take what insights you can. This needs to be emphasized more in learning maths. Once I got over this fact and was guided by my interest rather than wanting to grok everything, I actually started understanding a lot more.
- epaladin 13y agoSomeone should tell us that sooner then. I've been trying to get over math anxiety for a long time, and having professors that say "it's simple, what don't you understand?" when you try to get help didn't help much.
- j2kun 13y agoA common joke among mathematicians. Two mathematicians are working on a problem and one makes a claim to which the other replies, "That's trivial!" The pair stare at the claim for ten minutes. The other says, "Is it trivial?" They go home, think about it all night, publish three papers about it over the next two years, and then they agree, "Yes, it's trivial."