In the car today I was listening to a programme, one in a series, called A Brief History of Mathematics. When the presenter, a professor of maths, introduces the day's subject by saying, 'This is quite hard to understand - even Einstein struggled with it,' you can bet your bottom dollar that it's going to be beyond my understanding.
I'm still getting to grips with Euclid geometry - I did once get 99% in a geometry exam - but I was okay until they got onto imaginary numbers, theoretical physics, n dimensions and the theory of relativity. And it was only a fifteen-minute programme.
Even Carl Friedrich Gauss, jolly clever man sometimes referred to as the Prince of Mathematics, kept his ideas to himself for a long time for fear that he, who of all people was most respected, would be mocked.
I mean, did you know that 'Without the mathematics to describe curved space and multiple dimensions, the theory of relativity doesn't really work'?
No, nor me.
