The current cycle of AI and mathematics gives me great hope for ordinary people like myself to try and attempt learning some mathematics and try and see if I like the experience. Has any one tried that or is trying that? How are you approaching it? I would like to know - you can DM me - I would love to have a conversation if this excites you :)

I think the _key_ to knowing if I can do it has to come from the fact if my intuition about a problem helps me make progress. I would use AI to learn the parts I did not know and engage a community of people to ask questions. Both are key.

Also I am not 100% sure, but me beginning straightaway with lean to try something — like an engineer would — does not seem like the right approach before building some critical mass in the subject. It feels kinda wrong like building the cart before the wheel would.

The problem with trusting AI to learn a complex subject, which I've tried multiple times, is it will always at some point confidently give you the wrong explanation for something important and you will have no way to detect it. Its quite frustrating and that realization might not come for hours or days and you've built lots of false mental models that can be hard to untangle.

You have to do it along with some sort of ground truth, like a book, and you have to be able to understand that book in order to be able to see that bad advice immediately.

Alas, there are no shortcuts in life. You still need to very eagerly read and understand the source materials you're studying as you would have before AI and to the extent which AI is helpful for that is debatable. Your brain still has to do the thinking.

I can chime in about this. I’m a software engineer and about 7 years ago I decided to get a masters in pure mathematics. Because I was working full time, I could not attend any class so I self studied from textbooks and it worked well.

When I would get stuck, I would struggle with the problem, ask around, ask on Math Stackexchange and along the process I would end up learning a lot more.

With AI now, it’s like having your own tutor: you can ask personalized questions and it would answer it very well.

But that would also mean the amount of time I would spend struggling would go down considerably.

So you really have to be self disciplined and struggle with the problem a little bit before asking for help. You can also ask it to give hints only.

Do not mistake understanding the answer with learning something rigorously.

So if you are curious and doing an exposition, use it as you would normally and it will work wonderfully.

But if you want to learn it rigorously, our usual present habits with AI spitting out answers and us reading them will not work at all.

In my experience AI is a very bad teacher. It mumbles in AI-ish, a dialect of English which is difficult to understand without reading things twice. Also, it uses concepts before they are defined. And doesn't have a good mental model of what the reader knows. Stuff like that.

AI labs definitely should work on it.

I would think the exact opposite. I always lacked academic rigor and I own that.

How could you come in with less rigor and claim to understand things because you're using AI?. Sorry for the aggressive tone but is there an answer to that questipn?

> - you can DM me -

...how?