In 2021, a bunch of us, software engineers, did a small book club to learn analytic number theory from a book written by Apostol. We met for 40 minutes a day and read every line of the book and every page of the book in great detail. We did it for the joy of learning. It took us 79 hours spread across 120 days to complete reading the book and gain a good understanding of analytic number theory along with the analytic proof of the prime number theorem.
Sorry, but you don't properly learn any math topic in 80 hours. I've spent more than 10 hours on some problem sets in difficult courses. Solving hard problems takes a lot of time and is absolutely essential to learn math. When you read a book or a script you feel as if you have grasped the content, but most of the time you really haven't. It's only when you attack problems from different angles that you really build intuition for the concepts taught in that book.
The time recorded in the meeting log includes only the time spent together in reading the book and working through the proofs. There are some more details about our reading style here: https://susam.net/maze/journey-to-prime-number-theorem.html
I very much agree that attacking problems from different angles is very important in building intuition for the concepts taught in the book. However, that's something that we did not do within the 40 minute meetings. It wouldn't make sense too because I believe solving problems is very much a personal journey where different people need different amount of time to solve problems. I believe solving problems is best done on our own time. Sometimes though we did discuss the solutions of some problems in the meetings just to take a break from the theorem-and-proof style of meetings.
I solved most of the problems in the book in my own time. I know another participant who did too. Of course, that took a lot more than 80 hours. I must have spent an additional 2 to 3 hours everyday for solving the problems.
I skimmed your blog posts and logs, so apologies if I missed it. How many problems or exercises did you work through in the book? Did people put in any additional time individually between sessions?
I can't speak for all participants of these meetings and I haven't kept an exact count of the problems I solved but I believe I must have solved somewhere between 160 to 200 problems from the exercises in the book. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34908191 for more details on this topic.
Meetup log: https://susam.net/maze/meet/iant/log.html
A few blog posts about it: https://susam.net/maze/tag/iant.html