# Tag Info

3

Personally, I think back to times I previously thought this, and subsequently learnt the material anyway. It's especially noticeable in my current project of working through Awodey's Category Theory. Every so often I flick through the future chapters of the book and ask myself, "Can I understand the words on this page yet?" The answer is always no. Yet after ...

10

I guess we all encounter some "heavy" material from time to time and feel pressure for not being able to understand everything perfectly. This is perfectly normal, or to rephrase it in the immortal words of von Neumann: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." Personally, as long as I can remember, I've ...

3

I am experiencing precisely what you are describing - I am approaching a realm of mathematics new to me, in fact, I did not know it existed until 3 weeks ago. It will probably sound a bit cliched, but I have found some good effective strategies for developing the positive focused mindset that you describe involve: Starting from an application based ...

4

If it's a book on mathematics, a person wrote it. If a person wrote it, another person (you) can understand it. At least, you can understand it at least as well as the person who wrote it. In some cases that might end up being "not very well" ;) , but that's when it's time to dive for a more original, more basic textbook...if possible, one from the ...

0

The book by Gallian contains interesting elementary problems, which a beginner should try, and they are arranged in n increasing order of difficulty; but once we start solving them one-by-one then all are easier. The other book is "Abstract Algebra-Fraleigh" which contains exercises from elementary level to difficult level. It contains exercises of the ...

1

Read from another source that's shorter in length and better formulated. Linear algebra is a hefty course, but the time used for examples could well be used for absorbing the theory better. And you can find that theory from numerous sources, e.g. in the internet. I've found that textbooks can also be too hefty, if one doesn't have the time for reading them ...

5

Trying to fill in gaps through reading the hefty text book takes hours, just reading one or two pages to get thorough understanding can take an hour or more. I'm a professional mathematician. Far from brilliant or earthshaking, but I think at least competent. When I'm reading about a topic I don't already know just reading one or two pages can take me ...

2

1) Is there a study hall where students can go to and ask for help ? 2) Team up with your fellow students who are arguably in the same boat as you are, fix timings when you get together to work on the exercises 3) How well is the textbook written? Does it have enough exercises to practice the concepts? If not, is there a library to consult other books? I ...

5

Rather than ploughing through just the text, do exercises. Lots of them. Doing them will familiarize you with the concepts that you already covered and you will then be quicker in learning new concepts.

0

My two cents.Watch for tendencies,watch how changes are recorded in curves and formats to re-generate them as patterns. If a pattern is clear, then you have a victory over a class. Capturing relationships among variables .. I think is in the heart of math... Even recognizing something which does not change while change is the order everywhere ... that makes ...

0

There are all sorts of fields of endeavor, each with their own training regimen. I'm not certain that you can expect analogies. For instance, animators are told that everyone has 10,000 bad frames of animation in them, and their goal should be to get those out as soon as possible, so drawing a 20-frame walking cycle first thing each day is a good practice. ...

3

I don't think there is a direct equivalent, but one similar thing in mathematics is mathematical intuition. It's the "feeling" of what you need to do to solve a given task, and the "feeling" whether the answer to some question is yes or no. For example, if I ask you "Is $10!>2^{10}$", you will probably have no problem answering "yes", and if I ask you to ...

0

I learned calculus online at mathisfun.com. http://www.mathsisfun.com/calculus/

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