Comment by EdwardDiego
1 day ago
> I don’t think you understand how primitive American society is compared to Asia.
Lol, Asia is a big and diverse place. Are you really claiming that American society is more primitive than that of farmers in the arse end of Gansu?
Hint, one of those areas is more likely to have flush toilets.
Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.
I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
20 years ago, we had a server named after him. It was always fun explaining how to pronounce it and the who exactly he was.
The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him
Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read
A bit of googling suggests that the model for the mathematician in the film was George Dantzig, and he was actually studying mathematics at college level.
The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan fits your sentence, although early 20th C. He studied mathematics from a revision book he had access to in a small place in India then wrote a letter to GW Hardy a professor at Oxford with a range of new and strange results but expressed in the idiom of the revision book.
I don't necessarily agree with GPs, but I do think we're near the tipping point where the whole Eastern half of Asia combined is nearing or passing the Europe+US on the big progress-o-meter.
Some parts of East and Southeast Asia might have been working on paving roads and building schools even just one generation ago. To think they still are "like that" is legitimately an insult to them. That part is largely done and they're moving on.
This might be a shocker for you, but flush toilets are really not that big a deal compared to the Asian kind.