Can someone explain what is meant by "have never been worse for that" in the following paragraph.
Golan's book is good but its title is misleading. A whole chapter is devoted to the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse and I'm willing to bet that most professional mathematicians including, say, Grothendieck have no idea what it is about, and have never been the worse for that!
Thank you.
This is a stock phrase, perhaps more often encountered as to be none the worse for it.
To be the worse for something means "to be in a worse situation as a consequence" of it, and this phrase adds the emphatic negative none = "not at all". Your example could be paraphrased as
Professional mathematicians have never suffered any ill consequence from knowing nothing about the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse.
