I don't know if I agree with this. Advanced mathematics deals with layer upon layer of abstraction, and oftentimes there aren't significant shortcuts. A good fr

I don't know if I agree with this. Advanced mathematics deals with layer upon layer of abstraction, and oftentimes there aren't significant shortcuts. A good friend of mine did her doctorate in algebraic geometry, and there were important open questions in her field that would take two years of study in order to be able to understand the problem statement. Take the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In this case the problem is very easy to state (a^n + b^n = c^n has non-zero integer solutions only of n < 3). But the proof is very long (like over 100 pages at least?) and involves quite a lot of abstraction, well beyond integer arithmetic. Nobody's being pretentious here, it's just the nature of the field.