I don't believe that I'm a good communicator. I believe that lots of other people are simply very bad communicators... I don't think other people are… - Tadashi Tokieda

I'm fortunate enough to be friends and personally acquainted with some of the leading mathematicians of our age, but... I have never met a genius. They are all understandable. They are wonderful, wonderful people, and they really love what they are doing, and their creations... open up a whole world for you... but I don't think... I ever met a genius. ...In practical terms, it's much more useful to ...focus on other things. So that's why I'm skirting around your question on innate ability.

People say... discovering things is difficult and... extracting science from everyday life, and the mundane facts... requires talent and special aptitude and so on. I believe that's wrong for the following reason. The reason presupposes a certain belief and outlook on the universe. My outlook is... people say... "I don't like science." That's fair enough... and "Oh, I like science, but... I get tired after a while and I can't continue for so long"... [T]hat's very very reasonable. Or, "I try very very hard but I can't get through some difficulties." Well, what's more human than that? Sure, but... however fragile and... weak humans are, there's... one... creature (anthropomorphically speaking)... who keeps practicing science very very successfully, in fact with 100% success, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no stop... and has been doing it for ages and ages... everywhere you go, and that's Nature herself.

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.