Mathematics is not a spectator sport. - George Polya Somewhat ironically, I actually read this article after it surfaced on Hacker News on some previous occasi

Mathematics is not a spectator sport. - George Polya Somewhat ironically, I actually read this article after it surfaced on Hacker News on some previous occasion and did not realise until I got to the point where the author mentions how she worked on Russian trawlers in the Bering sea. The brain readily remembers unusual stuff but not the mundane. There was plenty of semi-unusual stuff before that paragraph - switching from languages to engineering, starting later in life after leaving the army etc. But it seems these were still too general to have made an imprint in my long term memory. Working a trawler in the Bering sea as a translator - that’s something I’ve not seen in any other article before or heard any other human talk about. Memory connection made. I think this is half the reason why solving problems and memorisation is needed for a lot of people - the material is so abstract that people struggle to tether it to anything in their memory.