“In the end, these tech talks inspired me more than they directly informed my algorithms. Honestly, much of the math they described was beyond me. I’m not an engineer by training—in fact, I never took a single math course in college. If there ever was an argument that I should have kept studying the subject beyond high school because there was no telling when I might need it, this was it. I was in over my head. Yet I wasn’t completely lost. When Richard Williamson joined Apple and helped us determine the technical direction for our web browser project, he showed that it was possible to make technical headway by skipping past the problems he couldn’t solve in favor of those he could. So, that’s what I did.”