I had my first real go at this course tonight. I may not be in as much trouble as I thought that I was. Well, I haven't looked at the TMA yet, but a lot of this is stuff that I've done before, albeit using a different notation.
There will be tiger-traps along the path, and on another-track some of the topology stuff is still, very-much, up in the air. But there may be a light at the end of the tunnel that isn't shining from something that's going to flatten me dead.
Things are still tight. Very tight. I did eight hours of maths today, not enougth. I'm going to have to do this again, and again, for the next two weeks. Still, mustn't dwell on my troubles.
M338 is a schitzophrenic thing of a course [so far] for a maths bod. It leaps between rigour and a mental-wavy-handidness that I find unsettling. It will eventually be rigourous and make sense I suppose, but it isn't turning out like I thought it would when I signed up.
What I desired was a greater insight about groups [Galios is my personal maths hero] but at the moment I feel like breaking out the protractor, straight-edge and dusting-off my [non-read] copy of Euclid.
I haven't looked ahead, but I have the suspicion that about one book in two is going to drive me mad.
Still, you can't pick and choose with maths, or computing; what you'd assumed was a boring arse-of-a-bag [cul-de-sac] turns out to be the road upon which you should set your feet.