John Von Neumann https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11267/what-are-some-interpretations-of-von-neumanns-quote https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/112

John Von Neumann https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11267/what-are-some-interpretations-of-von-neumanns-quote https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/11267/what-are-some... Does the followong seem right to you? Intuition often comes from relating a new thing to something known. So maths, as an abstraction of reality, initially has many sources of intuition. Later maths never has exactly the same patterns as earlier maths (it's already abstracted; so same patterns would be the same thing, though it cam build-on). Eventually, it doesn't relate to anything known, and you have to create that familiarity from scratch. That's hard... but if some stuff became known in the first place, why not this too? (One counter is that the other stuff was instinctively known, e.g. 3D space, or at least our minds are pre-shaped to know it, e.g. language). Assuming math is open-ended, there'll always be new stuff that doesn't relate.