Celebrating Tao's successes through media, movies and and other pop-culture vehicles, is very good, and I very happy this is happening. Shining the light into

Celebrating Tao's successes through media, movies and and other pop-culture vehicles, is very good, and I very happy this is happening. Shining the light into the continent of Mathematics, and its celebrity inhabitants, brings attention and, just may be a bit of the appreciation, of complex and demanding it is to live there... But, I do think, that to bring more and more people into the field, we have to also celebrate the diversity and range in the abilities, of the people who have, and who will have, contributed to the science of Mathematics. I am sure that not every accomplished, and well respected mathematician need to have the cognitive brilliancy of Tao or Nash. I find inspiration and, to a degree, comfort, in this quote by Alexander Grothendieck (specifically, the point where he felt, by far, he was not the most brilliant person in the room) >" ..Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects. .. In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.” ..." see also discussion on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604814 https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/405977.Alexander_Grothendieck https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/405977.Alexander_Gro...