Footnote:

The mathematical lore teaches the well-known joke about listeners in any given mathematical colloquium talk: after the first quarter only half of the audience may follow the speaker (not necessarily understand him), after the first half only the true experts are somehow aware of the main thrust of the argument, after the third quarter only the speaker understands, and by the end of the talk, even the speaker does not understand anymore what he is saying.

  Calculating the Limits of Poetic License:
Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics
Leo Corry - Tel Aviv University