This applies to any sort of coding, as well. Trivial mistakes compound and are difficult to find later. My general approach is unit testing. For each small section of work, do the calculation or process or sub-theorem or whatever in two different ways. Many times the check calculation can be an estimate, where you’re just looking for “unsurprising” as the comparison, rather than strict equality.
Yeah, with coding, unit testing plus assertions plus checking my intuitions against the code as John Wentworth described does in fact seem to work fairly well for me. I think the difficulty with algebra is that there’s not always an obvious secondary check you can do.
This applies to any sort of coding, as well. Trivial mistakes compound and are difficult to find later. My general approach is unit testing. For each small section of work, do the calculation or process or sub-theorem or whatever in two different ways. Many times the check calculation can be an estimate, where you’re just looking for “unsurprising” as the comparison, rather than strict equality.
Yeah, with coding, unit testing plus assertions plus checking my intuitions against the code as John Wentworth described does in fact seem to work fairly well for me. I think the difficulty with algebra is that there’s not always an obvious secondary check you can do.