Success comes from focusing on the most generative ideas, not from covering detail
again and again. This suggests to me that we need to seek the generative ideas that are
at the root of more powerful learning.
For many individuals, mathematics is complicated and it gets more complicated as
new ideas are encountered. For a few others, who seem to grasp the essence of the ideas,
the complexity of mathematics is fitted together in a way that makes it essentially
simple way. My head of department at Warwick University in the sixties, Sir
Christopher Zeeman noted perceptively:
“Technical skill is a mastery of complexity, while creativity is a mastery of
simplicity” (Zeeman, 1977)