You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it.
https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0?t=324
People only focus on that phrase since it makes a nice "talking point" and ignore all the other interesting things from Kay's talk. For example; i never knew that most of Euler's proofs were wrong w.r.t. rigorous approach as defined today!
People only focus on that phrase since it makes a nice "talking point" and ignore all the other interesting things from Kay's talk. For example; i never knew that most of Euler's proofs were wrong w.r.t. rigorous approach as defined today!