On a more general note, I find that anyone who says they “learned it from first principles” is usually putting on airs. It’s an odd intellectual purity norm that I think is unfortunately very common among the mathematically- and philosophically-minded.
As evolved chimpanzees, we are excellent at seeing a few examples of something and then understanding the more general abstractions that guide it on a gut level; we have an amazing ability to arrest form from thing, but our ability to go the other way around is a lot more limited.
I think most of your intellectual idols would agree that while eventually being able to build up “from first principles” is a great goal to shoot for, it’s actually not the pedagogy you want. It’s okay to start concrete and just practice and grind until the more abstract stuff becomes obvious!
Take it from a guy who leapt off the deep end this quarter into abstract algebra, real analysis, signal processing and probability theory at the same time—there is no way I would be performing at the level I am in these classes if I didn’t force my abstraction-loving ass down to ground level and actually just crank out problem sets until the abstractions finally started to make sense.
For your specific situation, may I recommend curling up with Visual Complex Analysis for a few hours? 😊 http://pipad.org/tmp/Needham.visual-complex-analysis.pdf
On a more general note, I find that anyone who says they “learned it from first principles” is usually putting on airs. It’s an odd intellectual purity norm that I think is unfortunately very common among the mathematically- and philosophically-minded.
As evolved chimpanzees, we are excellent at seeing a few examples of something and then understanding the more general abstractions that guide it on a gut level; we have an amazing ability to arrest form from thing, but our ability to go the other way around is a lot more limited.
I think most of your intellectual idols would agree that while eventually being able to build up “from first principles” is a great goal to shoot for, it’s actually not the pedagogy you want. It’s okay to start concrete and just practice and grind until the more abstract stuff becomes obvious!
Take it from a guy who leapt off the deep end this quarter into abstract algebra, real analysis, signal processing and probability theory at the same time—there is no way I would be performing at the level I am in these classes if I didn’t force my abstraction-loving ass down to ground level and actually just crank out problem sets until the abstractions finally started to make sense.