I left school in 1997. I don't think the year that you left school is relevant. There's not been such important developments in mathematics that you need them to understand most of modern physics. The question to be answered is why is there space at all? And why is there such a good approximation to think that actions from one quantum system to another seem to be not at a distance in this emergent space? These are not implacable questions, or these are not impossible questions. But that's a very different way of framing the question than, Oh, my goodness, there are these actions at a distance. What are we going to do about that? Sandy McDonald says, my handle