Same as above

Is it elementary or notoriously massive and is there any approaches(feel free to discuss about any heavy machinery approaches too) around which you think it(the diophantine equation) can be showed to have finitely many solutions given the specific constraint?

The title today is a reference to Douglas Adams' description of writing a book as "putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order." It's technically a correct description, but it doesn't really describe how anyone actually does it in practice. Just so, while it is technically true that one builds a proof by putting many inferences in a clever order, it doesn't describe how to actually do this.

A proof, like a book, is a collection of narrative threads---understand how to build narrative, and you will start to understand how to write a proof.

Read the full post (for free) on Substack: Putting a Hundred Inferences in a Cunning Order

I had my first grad-level exam this week and I bombed it pretty awfully. It was a 50min exam with ~12 problems, a mixture of proofs and counterexamples. I would say I solved 2 or 3 of them and made starts on 2 or 3 more; we haven't gotten grades back yet but I'm expecting something like a 20/100. The thing that's annoying me is that none of the problems were all that hard. I can tell that I could solve them all, only it would take more like 3-4 hours instead of 50min.

Part of me wants to think that the time frame was totally unreasonable, but another part of me thinks that it was a skill issue. I'm guessing a lot of members of this sub have dealt with similar situations, so I'm wondering if there is any advice for getting quicker at answering these early-grad-level types of exam questions?

One of my favorite essays on mathematics is Arnold's "On teaching mathematics." In it, he describes what he views as defects of the traditional treatments of real analysis and calculus in universities; and in particular, how the emphasis on rigor removed discussions of the beautiful geometry of Riemann surfaces and how they relate to calculus. As a specific example, he describes how one can tell which integrals are easy or hard to solve by looking at the genus of the associated Riemann surface.

This week on Hidden Phenomena, you can learn what Arnold meant by this comment: what is the "genus of the Riemann surface associated to an integral," and how does it help you understand if the integral is easy or hard?

Hello! I need some problem books to accompany the book Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces by M. Di Carmo. Thank you!