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i can’t stop thinking about this this would be sooo helpful

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· Sep 16, 2020

1. proofs in textbooks should be commented. the author should be commenting on which steps are routine, which steps are important to understand carefully, which steps are creative and surprising, etc. etc. sipser is the only textbook i've seen do anything like this and it rules

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acidshill

@acidshill

Sep 26, 2020

“You can’t learn everything from a book. There are a lot of things you can only learn by studying with an exper—“ “Yeah, have you thought about doing something about that?”

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Sep 26, 2020

my pet theory is that it's actually quite vulnerable to express an opinion about which parts of a proof are important and which parts are boring technicalities b/c it opens you up to criticism that your taste is bad

acidshill

@acidshill

Sep 26, 2020

i mean if you really wanted to go the extra mile you could put a hundred grad students in a room and say ‘you have an hour to prove this’ and measure how far they get does everyone get stuck on a particular step? guess that’s the important clever part

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Sep 26, 2020

there's sort of a teaching method that's just this but all the time called the moore method:

en.wikipedia.org

Moore method - Wikipedia

acidshill

@acidshill

Sep 26, 2020

hey this looks pretty cool did you have any classes with this?

QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

)

@QiaochuYuan

Replying to

@acidshill

nah but i kinda did it to myself which i think was pretty good. like i'd half-remember that some result was true and refuse to look up the proof until i'd spent anywhere from 5 minutes to a few days trying to work it out

5:58 AM · Sep 26, 2020Twitter Web App

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