OP here -- that is a fantastic anecdote!
Do you have an example of a "drawing" of a theorem, in this context? (I've seen these for fairly trivial theorems but not for more complex ones, so I'm curious.)
Do you have an example of a "drawing" of a theorem, in this context? (I've seen these for fairly trivial theorems but not for more complex ones, so I'm curious.)
As an undergraduate studying maths, I encountered a standard theorem in one of my first courses, which says that about 947 different conditions are equivalent to a matrix having a determinant of zero. I dutifully memorised these. I also dutifully memorised the algorithm for how to calculate a determinant. I might even have remembered some verbatim proofs of some of the equivalences.
However, I developed absolutely no intuition about what a determinant is. I had book knowledge, but no insight. It was a long time ago now, but I’m fairly sure that when I graduated I still did not truly understand even this very basic (by undergraduate standards) subject. I think it was probably a few years later, when I came across some of the same theory but in a much more practical context at work, that most of the connections in that equivalence theorem first “clicked”.
Meanwhile, here is what a gifted presenter with the right illustrations can do in about ten minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3X9LOh2dk
The 2,000 or so substantially identical comments below that video are very telling.
Given the understanding you’d get with that quality of presentation, the equivalences I mentioned above would have been obvious and constructing the proofs from first principles would have been straightforward.
This is the theorem I was talking about: https://i.imgur.com/1xEH51Z.png (taken from https://taimur.me/posts/thinking-at-the-right-level-of-abstr... which touches on a similar topic to your post)