alt Hacker NewsBecause trivial things aren't a prerequisite for novel things, as any theoretical mathematician who can't do long division will tell you.
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There's a difference between needing no trivial skills to do novel things and not needing specific prerequisite trivial skills to do a novel thing
That's not a good analogy. A good mathematician isn't necessarily dealing with calculations, i.e. long division, but rather with proof.
No-ones becomes a good mathematician without first learning to write simple proofs, and then later on more complex proof. It's the very stuff of the field itself.
Ah yes. The famous theoretical mathematicians who immediately started on novel problems in theoretical mathematics without first learning and understanding a huge number of trivial things like how division works to begin with, what fractions are, what equations are and how they are solved etc.
Edit: let's look at a paper like Some Linear Transformations on Symmetric Functions Arising From a Formula of Thiel and Williams https://ecajournal.haifa.ac.il/Volume2023/ECA2023_S2A24.pdf and try and guess how many of trivial things were completely unneeded to write a paper like this.
I would love to see someone attempt to do multiplication who never learned addition, or exponentiation without having learned multiplication.
There is a vast difference between “never learned the skill,” and “forgot the skill from lack of use.” I learned how to do long division in school, decades ago. I sat down and tried it last year, and found myself struggling, because I hadn’t needed to do it in such a long time.