Look through maths textbook

>look through maths textbook
>understand the section
>attempt exercises
>manage to do the rudimentary ones but utterly fail at the more complicated ones
>get nowhere
>have barely a clue how to get started
>cave in and look at the answers, telling myself it's the last time and next time I'll persevere
>sometimes it's some trick out of left field, (e.g., some random as fuck trig identity or a section of the chapter I had forgotten about)
>sometimes it's something I just never considered but looks obvious afterwards
>realise I am brainlet scum

I'm tempted to say to myself, "just work hard bro", but the point of being a high IQ person is that you should be getting the fucking answer, not having fucking difficulties. Being a high IQer means being good at doing, not having a certain amount of knowledge.

This is a brutal feeling. And I got top marks in my high school and university engineering maths courses (I am studying applied maths after finishing university).

>some random as fuck trig identity
Why do I keep hearing about it? Is trig college material in Clapistan or is it just this underage board?

*Just plow through it.
*Break difficult stuff down into their basic elements.
*Most difficult problems rely on applying or finding a trick that simplifies the problem.

> I have never used a trig identity in college

Must be hard studying gender philosophy

Are you fucking dumb? You can never do a entire textbook without looking at the answers.
But just copying the instructor's solution will not work.

>look at the answer
>"oh, then it's just this"
>redo the problem
>find similar problem where you can use the same technique you learnt on answers

Dumbass.

This, you should attempt and try doing it your own way, if ypu can't understand the solution and repeat it so you cab use it later on.

Trig identities is something you learn once in high school and don't bitch about on a Venezuelan shart sniffing digest, bubbah. Nobody puts hyperbolic arccosecants in college exercises, so you can fuck off with """"obscure"""".

>You can never do a entire textbook without looking at the answers.
brainlet spotted

Hi Newton.

Maybe at brainlet U they don't
faggot

So basically, you didn't study a program which required calculus. And if you did, fuck... what kind of bullshit school are you at?

This post makes no sense. If you don't use the single most important trig identity of all,

[math] \sin^2x + \cos^2 x = 1 [/math]

on a regular basis in the course of your education, then you're not doing an undergraduate course of study, or the equivalent thereof, irrespective of quality level (American, European, etc). You're doing something else - some quarternary education perhaps, or elementary education, or you're simply not studying math at the tertiary level.

In fact, fucking around with goofy trig identities just for the hell of it is grist for the mill of calculus exercises. But the above is the one really important one (law of sines is regularly useful as well) which crops up across various areas.

>he doesn't "just git it"

If you can do the easy problems but not do the more complex problems it is usually one or more of these issues
1) Little to no experience with multi-step proofs or possibly proofs in general
2) Lack of practice of standard techniques and theorems
3) Superficial understanding of the material
4) No tenacity towards actually solving the problem i.e. giving up after a few minutes
5) A fixed way of thinking about a certain concepts (a simple shift in thinking or definitions can turn a difficult problem into a trivial one)
6) Lack of tools, sometimes it really is the case that there is a theorem you need that you've never seen before
7) Unable to remember or use problem solving techniques, although you're looking at the proofs you fail to understand the mentality behind why you'd use those techniques and thus fail to recognize when to use them again. An analogue of this in another place is chess, a common technique in chess is to play through old games without looking ahead and trying to justify why a grandmaster would make certain moves by placing yourself in the situation and mimicking the thought process.

You might actually want to try looking at a problem solving text like polya's book, it'll help for a few of these, but honestly the remedy is just to do lots of problems, break them down to the assumptions and conclusion and find what theorems are relevant to those, usually just from that you can gain a heuristics justification as to why it's true, then just fill in the blanks. Mind you this is for standard text book exercises, even those that are moderately difficult. Frankly, lots of math problems are the same just in different dress, I mean that in that the core arguments are the same, think about problems concerning continuity, energy estimates for pdes, horrendous integrals, universal properties, coloring problems, and so on, they each have a certain "flavor" to them and with that a certain set of standard techniques, tricks, and heuristics.

you will get better possibly

Cool down OP. Just learn by heart every argument that didn't come to you when you were doing the exercise. Eventually, your memory will build up into an intuition, and you'll have more and more tool to solve any given problem.

This is the aim of exercices : giving you tricks, methods, to solve more serious problems. Don't be sad if you didn't know every single trick. If it was the case, it would mean that you already know everything about this field, and you don't need to study it.

Mathematics is a lot about memorization. Don't forget it.

sounds like lack of practice to me. this sounds pretty typical for someone who might have a very good ability to understand material, but has just never actually put it to use/solved real problems.

slader

Get some help dude. It pays off to get some one-on-one tutoring, especially if your college offers it for free somewhere.

It'll be okay bro

practice makes perfect

Hah!
Barely in 2nd sem. Of uni.
Already saw dif. Integration methods for those.
>3rd world

>look through maths textbook
>attempt exercise.
>fail
>start at page one, look through maths textbook
>attempt exercsie
>fail a little further
>start at page one, look through maths textbook

That's how Isaac Newton learned Descartes' books. This actually works, often I won't get something then just forget about it for a few days. I'll come back and re-read a bit, and presto I figure it out.