Freeman Dyson studied in very unusual circumstances and got more support than most PhD students. He was regularly playing billiard and discussing math with famo

Freeman Dyson studied in very unusual circumstances and got more support than most PhD students. He was regularly playing billiard and discussing math with famous professors at age 17. From his collection of letters "Maker of Patterns": >I arrived as a seventeen-year-old undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, in September 1941. It was a great time to get an education, in the middle of World War II. The famous old professors were all there, but there were hardly any students. >I have fixed up all my lectures now, they are: Hardy on Fourier series, Besicovitch on integration, Dirac on quantum mechanics, Pars on dynamics. The lectures are very select; Hardy has an audience of four, Besicovitch three, Pars four, and Dirac about twenty Here's a video of him speaking about the PhD system, part of a great interview series: https://youtu.be/DzC1IRYN_Ps?t=98 https://youtu.be/DzC1IRYN_Ps?t=98 (“It is an evil system and it has ruined many lives”)