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Taco Cohen on X: "Exactly. I learned a ton of math during my PhD, and it was fun and easy *because I had a goal* to use it in my research. Coding it up is also a great way to detect gaps in your understanding. Totally different from learning in class. Another common fallacy is that you need to" / X

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To view keyboard shortcuts, press question mark View keyboard shortcuts Home Explore Notifications Chat Grok Premium Bookmarks Communities Profile More Post Ishan Mukherjee @ishanjmukherjee Post Reply See new posts Conversation Taco Cohen @TacoCohen Exactly. I learned a ton of math during my PhD, and it was fun and easy *because I had a goal* to use it in my research. Coding it up is also a great way to detect gaps in your understanding. Totally different from learning in class. Another common fallacy is that you need to follow the logical curriculum and complete all the prerequisites for a topic before learning it. Instead I find that going up and down the curriculum repeatedly is much more effective. That way, you have an understanding of where the basics fit in, and why you're learning it, which helps with comprehension and motivation. Inspired by the success of LLM pretraining, I even started reading random papers by Grothendieck, Scholze and Mochizuki that are way above my hea

Taco Cohen @TacoCohen Exactly. I learned a ton of math during my PhD, and it was fun and easy *because I had a goal* to use it in my research. Coding it up is also a great way to detect gaps in your understanding. Totally different from learning in class. Another common fallacy is that you need to follow the logical curriculum and complete all the prerequisites for a topic before learning it. Instead I find that going up and down the curriculum repeatedly is much more effective. That way, you have an understanding of where the basics fit in, and why you're learning it, which helps with compreh

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