puma_usa's blog

By puma_usa, history, 41 hour(s) ago, translation, In English

I’ve set myself the goal of scoring 1900 points over the year. One of the steps toward this goal is to work through a math book titled "Selected Problems and Theorems of Elementary Mathematics". I planned to go through the entire book in a year, solving 5 problems a day (consecutively, without skipping). I was able to keep up for the first couple of days, but as you know, olympiad math problems can block you if you don’t come up with a specific idea. Now I’m wondering which approach would be more optimal: should I continue at this pace, and if I can’t solve 5 problems in a day, should I read the solutions to the unsolved ones and move on, or should I give myself a conditional 3-day limit for each problem (and during that time, not solve anything else) before looking at the solution? In other words, which approach would lead to more progress? Will I make more progress by rushing through the entire book and solving about half of the problems on my own, or would it be better to get stuck on some problems and, in the worst case, only solve 20-30% of the book, but with higher quality neural connections (i.e., there’s no guarantee I’ll solve all the problems, but I might generate many new ideas, some of which might be silly, while others could be smart)?

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