Not really. The point of getting really good at it in your teenage years is so that when it shows up 30 years later you have a vauge idea of what you’re looking at and can figure it out again. If you had only a surface level understanding to begin with, it’ll all be totally gone by the time you need it again, and very few people have the gumption to teach themselves a subject from scratch.
Apparently, they didn’t know it by heart. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to spend all that time searching.
The point being that memorizing complex math is pointless unless you’re using it for some sort of day to day.
Not really. The point of getting really good at it in your teenage years is so that when it shows up 30 years later you have a vauge idea of what you’re looking at and can figure it out again. If you had only a surface level understanding to begin with, it’ll all be totally gone by the time you need it again, and very few people have the gumption to teach themselves a subject from scratch.