Study actively. Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?
Paul R. Halmos
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
G.H.Hardy
Mathematics is the art of giving the same
name to different things.
Henri Poincaré
The essence of mathematics is its freedom.
Georg Cantor
And I'll go even further and say that mathematics, this art of abstract pattern-making — even more than storytelling, painting, or music - is our most quintessentially human art form. This is what our brains do, whether we like it or not. We are biochemical pattern-recognition machines and mathematics is nothing less than the distilled essence of who we are.
Paul Lockhart
Basis MathJax Tutorial
List of Generalizations of Common Questions
Visualization of $\Bbb{RP^2}$