Open nickretallack opened 4 years ago
There is a tradeoff between how slowly one can explain new things and the resulting size of the book. This book is already thick, I'm afraid. Reading every paragraph 5 times is not a bad idea. This is how you read math books. When I started reading MacLane, it took me weeks to understand the first few paragraphs. Eventually you catch up, though, so don't give up.
@nickretallack : Another strategy is "just keep reading", without caring about too much with every possible interpretation behind every single line. Just keep reading. "You just need to get used to it." -- said my first Physics teacher at uni, when explaining concepts far ahead of lessons of Calculus which should preceed lessons of Physics... but they didn't. "Just get used to it."... just keep reading... and the coin will eventually drop later. Then, if you read the book once again you will be able to understand what it is about in every detail, since you will have knowledge captured from "future" lessons.
Unfortunately, certain subjects are difficult to explain in a sequential manner, since the knowledge mankind accumulated on those subjects was not built linearly, but by trial and error, by injecting lessons learned from the future and into weak theoretical basis built in past, in a process of continuous feedback loop, refining again and again the previous iterations.
I started reading this hoping that it would be a good way for me to understand category theory when most explanations are full of overwhelming amounts of math lingo that's difficult for me to picture. I was doing fine until this part in 3.3:
My eyes glazed over reading this. What do all these words mean? I continued reading, hoping the rest would be simpler, but then I got to 3.5. Argh.
I mean, I kind of get it after reading this paragraph 5 times, but this phrasing is really dense and difficult for me to follow. Perhaps if it was spread out a bit and had examples?
I also don't understand the exercises in this chapter, and I'm not sure how to know if I did them right because there doesn't appear to be an answer key.