- #1
Lucretius
- 152
- 0
I'm sure that for many of you this class is old news; but I just started elementary number theory this summer and, as much as I love the challenge of the course, and doing these proofs; I feel like an amateur boxing Mike Tyson here. These things are chewing me up and spitting me out. Granted I can do some of the proofs, but a lot of them (granted my classmates are struggling too) are just plain impossible (nearly so) for me to figure out, and when I see the actual proof it almost discourages me even more because the proof is so obvious after having seen it.
I was wondering how you were able to stay motivated for hours, days, working on a proof that in the end you were never able to solve… perhaps it is just me, but I get discouraged plugging away hour after hour on a problem only to find it has some simple solution that wasn't one of the hundreds of different ways I tried to approach it. I took both logic courses offered at my college to prepare for proofs, and I have taken a proofs class before, which was the only college math course I managed to ace, so I was hoping this would be about the same, but it's not! How do you all stay motivated?!
Thanks!
I was wondering how you were able to stay motivated for hours, days, working on a proof that in the end you were never able to solve… perhaps it is just me, but I get discouraged plugging away hour after hour on a problem only to find it has some simple solution that wasn't one of the hundreds of different ways I tried to approach it. I took both logic courses offered at my college to prepare for proofs, and I have taken a proofs class before, which was the only college math course I managed to ace, so I was hoping this would be about the same, but it's not! How do you all stay motivated?!
Thanks!