For the past week, I hadn't done anything but math. High school math.
Writing an "Outline of High School Math Problem-Solving Techniques" was far harder than I'd imagined.
The hard part was figuring out how to improve their math grades using language they could understand. Maybe that was the kind of thing math teachers and educational-materials experts were good at, not me.
I studied nearly ten years' worth of college entrance exam math papers. Anything from more than ten years ago wasn't very useful for reference.
I got full marks on all ten of those exams in under thirty minutes, but I was a failure, because I'd used a lot of mathematical knowledge and techniques beyond the high school curriculum.
I tried applying Functional Analysis and divergent series analysis to the ten exams. It took me 13.5 hours. I didn't eat or drink, and I only went to the bathroom once. I nearly passed out on the toilet.
I assumed the exams were a special kind of "function," following some rules I'd "imagined." I established a connected, closed region containing them all, then used oscillating series from divergent series to approximate the "exam function."
The result surprised me and made me especially curious. I'd distilled a kind of "general method"... though it was really only a half-finished product.
The "general method" was just a logical framework. I needed to flesh it out with the most fundamental high school math concepts: sets, Trigonometric Functions, Solid Geometry, Plane Analytic Geometry, introductory algorithms, sequences, and so on.
This painstaking work might take several months, or even more than a year.
Fortunately, Euler's formula and closed surfaces, symmetry and groups from elective course 2-3, as well as matrices and transformations from elective course 4-1, had helped me immensely.
I'd try to finish the first