Aschbacher considered himself somewhat of an outsider in the world of conventional group theory, claiming that he was not "plugged into the system at that point in time".

[6] Although he had access to several preprints that were shared among the practitioners of the field, he reproduced many proofs that had already been discovered by other researchers and published them in his early papers.

He wrote his dissertation in combinatorics and was able to utilize many techniques developed in this area to make early contributions to the study of finite simple groups, which surprised the community of researchers.

[7] In fact, the rate of Aschbacher's results proved so astounding that many other mathematicians decided to leave the field to pursue other problems.

Aschbacher was proving one major result after another and when he announced his progress at the Duluth conference, mathematicians were convinced that the problem was almost solved.

That Aschbacher's proofs were hard to read was not due to a lack of ability, but rather to the astounding complexity of the ideas he was able to produce.