I’ve been out of undergrad for about 4 years now and did my degree in Pure Math. I graduated with a 4.0 GPA taking pretty much all the core undergrad courses and some “advanced undergrad”/“early grad” courses.
I’ve been working in industry since and my math skills have definitely atrophied. I’ve been looking to get back into grad school and have started lightly reviewing my old notes and whatnot.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that outside of calculus/elementary analysis I feel like I don’t really understand math. Or the big picture. Like in school I knew the definitions, could put them together, and do the proofs. But looking back I feel like I never really “got it” if that makes any sense.
To this day I feel like I don’t really understand the determinant, or the rank nullity theorem. Or how group theory is the study of symmetry. I understand automorphisms form a group, cayley’s theorem, group actions etc but the “intuition” I guess never clicked.
Galois theory for instance felt like I was just throwing a bunch of field extensions around and poof a random result of sorts. Or like topology which was just a bunch of definitions and homeomorphisms.
Is this a common occurrence? I feel like it likely had to do with the pace of school where I didn’t really have time to sit down with the topics. Has anyone else experienced this? Did anyone have to review/redo their undergrad material for stuff to really click?