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Comment on How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to Universityparent

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If anyone knows a good way to check proofs by yourself, let me know. I love it, but you pretty much have to have other mathematicians tell you when you're doing something horribly wrong.

By the way, did anyone else have to take engineering maths instead and feel they were somewhat lacking?

Just check everything carefully. If you've written your proof properly every step should follow logically from previous steps, and you should be able to check if yourself without issues. The problems happen when you're not critical enough of yourself, when the proof is very large and complex, or when you don't know your base axioms and the assumptions of your theorems well enough.

Proving the security of cryptographic protocols is a counterexample to this. Sometimes basic assumptions are very difficult to catch.

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