Reminder: This post contains 1030 words
· 3 min read
· by Xianbin
This post lists some reasons of why people do not understand theory papers easily. Here are three major reasons.
- You do not have the basic theory ground
- You are not clear about the definitions
- You do not catch the main ideas
1. insufficient foundational knowledge:
Understanding theoretical papers often requires a strong mathematical background.
2. unclear about the definition
If you do not clearly understand some definition, you will be stuck. So, once you do not understand a proof, particularly a paragraph. You need to check every definition carefully again. You can create some tiny examples to help you understand the definition. It is quite useful to ask ChatGPT directly.
3. missing the main idea
We had to admit that it is hard to understand some papers, because you do not know why they do that. One trick is to ask ourselves: why do they do that? If it fails, we can write the important paragraphs down and try to get the point. If we still do not know the paper, we should put it aside and try to understand it later.
4. combinatorial cases
I believe for most people, they will have some combinations of the above problems. So, for such cases, we need to increase our knowledge, be clear about the definition and catch the main idea.