Comment by cutemonster
17 hours ago
> document the secret "oral tradition" of top mathematician
> A good number of Abel prize winners & Fields medallists have read my book and found it important and accurate. It's been blurbed by Steve Strogatz and Terry Tao.
Sounds like people mostly living in different bubbles? What do they know about the world?
They aren't hanging out with the kids who fail in school because maths and reading and writing is to hard, and then start selling drugs instead and get guns and start killing each other.
> [they] don't think it's because of their genes
Do you think someone would tell you, if he/she thought it was?
I mean, that can come off as arrogant? Wouldn't they rather tend to say "it was hard work, anyone can do it" and prioritize being liked by others
> Pareto-like distribution like what we see in math
Unclear to me what you have in mind. If there's a graph it'd be interesting to have a look? I wonder whats on the different axis, and how you arrived at the numbers and data points
> Sounds like people mostly living in different bubbles? What do they know about the world?
Well, they do know something about math — in particular that it requires a certain "attitude", something that no-one told them about in school and they felt they only discovered by chance.
Starting from Descartes and his famous "method", continuing with Newton, Einstein, Grothendieck all these guys insisted that they were special because of this "attitude" and not because of what people call "intelligence". They viewed intelligence as a by-product of their method, not the other way around. They even wrote books as an attempt to share this method (which is quite hard to achieve, for reasons I explain in my book.)
Why do you bring "kids who fail in school" and "start selling drugs" into this conversation? What does it have to do with whether math genius is driven by genetics or idiosyncratic cognitive development?
And why would a mathematician be disqualified from discussing the specifics of math just because they're not hanging out with lost kids? Are you better qualified? Did you sequence the DNA of those kids and identified the genes responsible for their learning difficulties?
>> [they] don't think it's because of their genes
> Do you think someone would tell you, if he/she thought it was?
Well, an example I know quite well is mine. I was certainly "gifted" in math — something like in the top 1% of my generation, but not much above and definitely nowhere near the IMO gold medallists whom I met early in my studies.
A number of random events happened to me, including the chance discovery of certain ways to mentally engage with mathematical objects. This propelled me onto an entirely different trajectory, and I ended up solving tough conjectures & publishing in Inventiones & Annals of Math (an entirely different planet from the top 1% I started from)
My relative position wrt my peer group went through a series of well-delineated spikes from 17yo (when I started as an undergrad) to 35yo (when I quit academia), associated with specific methodological & psychological breakthroughs. I'm pretty confident that my genes stayed the same during this entire period.
And as to why I was initially "gifted", I do have some very plausible non-genetic factors that might be the explanation.
I don't claim this proves anything. But I see no reason why my account should be disqualified on the grounds that I'm good at math.
Usually, competency in one domain is presumed to make you a bit more qualified than the random person on the internet when it comes to explaining how this domain operates. Why should math be the exception?