Awesome.

I am, of course, in the market for a study partner. Please don't be intimidated by the fact that I've been at this for a couple months already: my formal education included bachelors degrees in computer science and economics, so I still feel behind all you math majors and graduate students out there.

I'm not sure how best to make this work, but here are a few of my thoughts:

I recommend against limiting studying to times when you are together. I tend to do a fair bit of studying on bus rides and over meals, and I feel that only studying together would be somewhat limiting. It might be useful to have an IRC / video hangout going in the background or something, but for me, at least, the actual reading of the text is a more private endeavor.

I think that most of the gains from pairing up will come from social incentives (agreements to read a certain amount each day/week, checkups, etc) and the ability to have conversations along these lines:

So8res > Hey, ping me when you've read past the proof at the end of p480
Partner > Already past it.
So8res > How is [step] justified? Isn't that invalid because [misunderstanding]?
Partner > Nope. [reason]

The ability to have these conversations would have increased my velocity pretty significantly. There doesn't even need to be real-time communication: the ability to email someone with heavily contextualized questions, knowing that they've been working on the same content recently, would be incredibly valuable.

I also expect there's benefit to be had by meeting up at the end of each chapter and doing the following:

1) Motivate the major concepts of each chapter to each other. There's a gap between "I understand what was said" and "I understand why that was important to say", and explaining concepts really helps me cross that gap. I'd suggest either

• Each member drafts a brief overview of these concepts in, say, an email; you're not allowed to read the other person's email until you've sent your own.
• You divy up the theorems and each of you explain half to the other.

The first is probably more interesting (I'd enjoy contrasting the interpretations), but the latter requires half the effort.

2) Do the problems together. As long as both parties are participating, this may speed things up significantly. You have to be careful to avoid the scenario where one party watches while the other solves problems, though. At the very least, there's benefit to be had by doing problems and comparing answers.

These are my best guesses for how to make studying easier. Keep in mind that this probably varies from person to person, and that these views are likely to change in actual practice. That said, if this sounds desirable to you, let me know and we can get something started.