> OP, you should try to get someone to work with you.
Those both sound like great suggestions to me.
When I was a linguistics major in college, around 1976, I started wondering about pure mathematics—it seemed a lot more interesting than high-school calculus, which had snuffed out my previous interest in math—so I took an introductory class in abstract algebra. It was the first math class I had taken that was oriented around proofs rather than calculation, and I had trouble at first understanding what proofs were and how I was supposed to come up with them.
I went to see the professor during his office hours to ask for advice, and he told me something like this: “A proof is basically a story you tell to other mathematicians.” It took a while for the meaning of his advice to sink in, but it did eventually, especially after I took a couple of seminar-style classes in which the students worked on proofs together.
Looking back now, I would summarize what I learned then as follows: A proof is a story you tell to other intelligent, knowledgeable people to convince them that the theorem is true. As with all story-telling, you have to adjust what you say and how you say it depending on your audience and on their knowledge and expectations. If you are new to mathematical proofs, then you need to work with other people for a while to learn how mathematicians use proofs to tell stories to each other.
> OP, you should try to get someone to work with you.
Those both sound like great suggestions to me.
When I was a linguistics major in college, around 1976, I started wondering about pure mathematics—it seemed a lot more interesting than high-school calculus, which had snuffed out my previous interest in math—so I took an introductory class in abstract algebra. It was the first math class I had taken that was oriented around proofs rather than calculation, and I had trouble at first understanding what proofs were and how I was supposed to come up with them.
I went to see the professor during his office hours to ask for advice, and he told me something like this: “A proof is basically a story you tell to other mathematicians.” It took a while for the meaning of his advice to sink in, but it did eventually, especially after I took a couple of seminar-style classes in which the students worked on proofs together.
Looking back now, I would summarize what I learned then as follows: A proof is a story you tell to other intelligent, knowledgeable people to convince them that the theorem is true. As with all story-telling, you have to adjust what you say and how you say it depending on your audience and on their knowledge and expectations. If you are new to mathematical proofs, then you need to work with other people for a while to learn how mathematicians use proofs to tell stories to each other.