alt Hacker NewsI always struggled with my lack of intuition vs that of my peers that had had a more comprehensive ‘math upbringing’.
Is direct experience and struggle really the only driver for developing intuition?
I always struggled with my lack of intuition vs that of my peers that had had a more comprehensive ‘math upbringing’.
Is direct experience and struggle really the only driver for developing intuition?
I am a mathematician, and I was never the kind to like to struggle by working on problems, but I developed a lot of intuition by 1) thinking deeply about definitions and proofs and why are they this way and not another 2) reading a lot of blogs and expository papers by great mathematicians, even (the more philosophically minded) mathoverflow q&a's (so I absorbed their way of thinking unconsciously). For example, I tell my students to read all 300 of John Baez's This Week's Finds posts [1] and they will deeply understand more math than 99% of their peers.
This is not the "standard" advice that usually gets peddled but for me it "worked".
[1] https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/twf.html