"Many people say mathematics is very difficult to learn, and so it is, and it's probably one of the most difficult things that you can learn, and besides, human brains are not really well adapted to mathematics. It's designed for doing other things, but a lot of mathematical difficulties that people encounter... are actually linguistic. ...[T]here is a definition, a very very precise way of thinking about the limits, and continuity and so on, which... goes under the name of epsilon and delta. So for every epsilon there exists a delta such that... and blah, blah, blah... [T]his is a stumbling block for just about everyone, but when I came into mathematics as an adult... I felt no difficulty whatsoever. In fact I didn't even notice that it was supposed to be difficult. That's because I had been very rigorously trained in the use of languages, as a linguist. ...[S]o the idea that if you change the order quantifiers, of course the meaning changes completely. It was trivial, of course... Compared with the task of taking apart the syntax of somebody like Thucydides... whose sentence continued for a page, with subordinate clause upon subordinate clause... By the way, he writes really clearly, but in a complicated . ...[C]ompared to that kind of thing, the language of mathematics was very very easy. ...[T]here is nothing to it."