[Mandelmus]

As a current compsci masters student at ETH Zurich: yes, having those explanations is wonderful, but that just means that topics like SVD and PCA are taken for granted now, and the things that we need to chew on are things for which no nice canonical explainers have been created (and that likely weren’t taught in 1990).

Personally I think that innovation in explanation/illustration of abstract mathematical topics is one of the most valuable kinds of progress, but it’s rarely talked about as such. When someone comes up with the right framework, visualisation, or metaphor for explaining a complex and abstract subject in a way that induces “the right” mental model, and this new teaching “tool” proliferates, that is just a beautiful thing to see.