Many students tend to see mathematics as a disparate collection of rules procedures theorems definitions formulae or applications. Such students believe that mathematical ideas should be memorised and then used to solve problems. Clearly though such a disjointed approach to learning mathematics becomes increasingly untenable as the level of complexity and abstraction increases. But are these students ever likely to appreciate how mathematics fi ts together as an abstract system of thought if they merely attend lectures and work away on solving problems? It remains difficult to shift ingrained perceptions of our discipline and it seems unreasonable to expect that it will simply be suffi cient to present students with the fi nished products of mathematical rigour.
