This is a very underrated comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055053 I've came to this conclusion on

This is a very underrated comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055053 I've came to this conclusion on my own years ago. I wholeheartedly agree that there are books whose authors don't understand the subject. There is no other explanation for writing books so badly. I keep thinking that if you know a subject well enough, you'll surely be able to write a comprehensible book on it, be it maths or anything else. They say that Feynman said something similar: "If you can't explain this to kids, you don't understand it well enough". Not sure if I agree completely with that cause advanced math. subjects typically require prior knowledge (just the way it is, no way around it), but the concepts.. perhaps you can explain them to a certain degree. Some times, at least in maths, older literature is written in such a better way, it's unbelievable. Modern literature is terse and dry. This is the skeleton: -definitions -some axioms that we take for granted -theorems based on the previous two -and (usually) the simplest examples the authors can find And then a list of exercises. Some of them extremely simple, some of them postdoc. research (say, Engelking's topology exercises - if you can solve them all, you can probably publish double digit amount of papers) There's usually no explanation, no historic importance of certain results, no motivation for what truly moved the mathematician to discover/invent that, and so on. It's like we don't get to the bottom of things, only to the surface..