One of the reasons we don't do as well as we should is that we are all over-taught.

In the Middle Age, in Germany, if you wanted to learn addition and multiplication, you could go to any university. But if you wanted to learn division, you could only do it in one place, Heidelberg. This makes sense, since in my theory with Vladimir Retakh and Robert Wilson, addition and multiplications are cheap, but division is expensive.

People (or students) do not have shortcomings, only uniquenesses. The goal of a good teacher is to turn these uniquenesses into advantages.

The older I get, the more I believe that at the bottom of most deep mathematical problems there is a combinatorial problem.

I used to say: "Everything is Representation Theory". Now I say: "Nothing is Representation Theory".

One of the reasons we don't do as well as we should is that we are all over-taught.

... The approach of von Neumann and Connes to the use of non-commutative algebra in physics is naive, the situation is much more complicated.