"“I understood nothing, but it was really fascinating,” he said. So Scholze worked backward, figuring out what he needed to learn to make sense of the proof. “To this day, that’s to a large extent how I learn,” he said. “I never really learned the basic things like linear algebra, actually — I only assimilated it through learning some other stuff.”"
https://www.quantamagazine.org/peter-scholze-and-the-future-...