There's an anecdote in Feynman's book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" It is about an interaction he had with a couple of his classmates in college. They used a tool in mechanical drawing class called a French curve. Nobody knew what was so special about it. So he explained to his classmates that a French Curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal. All of his classmates' minds were blown at this discovery. These were students at M.I.T. and had gone through many years of calculus classes to know that the derivative of the minimum of any curve is zero (horizontal). Prof. Feynman says that "..they didn't even know what they knew!"

I've realized that the best way to understand something is to be able to explain it in simple terms; as it's easier to macro-bs than micro-bs. These posts are a forcing function to do put into simple concise words some of the things I'm working on, and make my understanding of these topics better, because there is no point in just knowing the names of things.