Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?

Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility? by artagnon on Sunday May 05, 2019 @12:21AM (#19831137)

I agree that it's necessary to do exercises in order to understand the subject, but I disagree that you need to have them checked by someone else -- in many cases, you should be check it for yourself, honestly.

Beyond the junior undergraduate level, computation-style problems go away, and you're just left with exercises that ask you to prove a certain something. It takes a long time to build up a sufficient degree of rigor, but it happens eventually -- I did go get some of my proofs checked by serious Mathematicians at some point, and it turned out that my intuition wasn't far behind.

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Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility? by _hardwaregeek on Sunday May 05, 2019 @11:19AM (#19833215)

The main reason you'd want proofs to be checked by someone else, at least initially, is to get a feel for writing clear, rigorous and tight proofs. Much as a novice programmer should have their code reviewed, a novice mathematician needs to have their math reviewed for common mistakes and pitfalls.

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