After reading the two articles, I’m actually surprised I didn’t previously realize how important the writing portion of math is. I always thought that showing work was required, but I didn’t know to what extent and how to actually prove things correctly. Before I would show work to explain to a teacher, as if they know what I am already talking about, but I am just clarifying my work. However, these articles introduced the fact that when I write proofs or show work, I should have the intention to be writing things out to someone who has no experience or understanding of a certain topic. The one example in Dr. Cheng’s essay was x=y. During a math problem, I would usually think this was obvious and didn’t find the need to prove this out. But in fact, x=y is a math proof that needs to be justified through its work. One question that came to me while reading this was, how do I know to what extent I need to be “writing” my math work? Something I recently started doing was writing out each step in a math problem, and taking a different colored pen to write the Theorems or explanations next to each step. I’m not sure if this is correct according to Dr. Cheng and Dr. Su’s guidelines, however, I believe it helps peers who read my work to better understand the background of why I am doing certain things in each step. From both articles, I can’t really say I disagree with anything because I haven’t formally been doing these steps in any math form, however, I think these processes will take a lot of time to learn and master. I was not taught to write math in this way, so all the steps and etiquettes are new to me. I do agree that when proving theorems or problems, the beginning/middle/end way is a good way to look at things. The middle is exactly what we have to do to get from the start to the end, and although it’s a lot of work, taking these steps will definitely help mathematicians better understand problems.
Reading material:
Read Dr. Francis Su’s article on writing mathematics. (Links to an external site.)
(Links to an external site.)Read this essay by Dr. Cheng on how to write proofs
I have attached my post too, so you can know my views and don’t contradict anything in reply
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