A more recent royal reference:
"'Yau wants to be the king of geometry,' Michael Anderson, a geometer at Stony Brook, said. 'He believes that everything should issue from him, that he should have oversight. He doesn't like people encroaching on his territory.'" –Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber in The New Yorker, issue dated Aug. 28, 2006
Wikipedia, Cultural references to the Royal Road:
"Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry.' Charles S. Peirce, in his 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878), says 'There is no royal road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price of close attention.'"
Day Without Logic
(March 8, 2007)
and
The Geometry of Logic
(March 10, 2007):
There may be
no royal roads to
geometry or logic,
but…
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
— Madeleine L'Engle,
A Wrinkle in Time