I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
TLDR:  The author independently re-discovered what you may know as Old Code Syndrome.<p>I think that&#x27;s because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition.<p>This guy&#x27;s basically in the position of a fairly new developer who&#x27;s just been asked to do non-trivial update of his own code for the first time.  All those clever one-liners he put into his code made him feel smart and got the job done at the time.  But he&#x27;s now beginning to realize that if he keeps doing that, he&#x27;s going to be cursed by his future self when he pulls up the code a few months later (never mind five years!) and has zero memory of how it actually works.<p>I&#x27;m not intending to disparage the author; I&#x27;ve been there, and if you&#x27;ve been a software developer for a while you&#x27;ve likely been there too.<p>Any decent programmer with enough experience will tell you the fix is to add some comments (more expository text than &quot;it is obvious that...&quot; or &quot;the reader will quickly see...&quot;), unit tests (concrete examples of abstract concepts), give variables and procedures descriptive names (The Wave Decomposition Lemma instead of Lemma 4.16), etc.