Question: what's the hardest part of math in your opinion?

Amy Mason answered on 15 Nov 2024:

Coping with not being able to answer something. The more maths you do as a career, the harder and harder the questions get. When you work as a mathematician at a university, you work on problems that no-one has managed to solve yet. This means that you have to invent new methods and new approaches to solve the problem, and most of the things you invent either don’t work or work but aren’t helpful to the problem you hoped they would solve. Most days you don’t get to an answer, instead you are chipping away at a problem by getting things wrong and finding more approaches that don’t work.
The most important attribute of a research mathematician isn’t intelligence or being good with mental arithmetic. It is being willing to persist even when you can’t find the solution, over and over again.