Compared to Gauss or Erdős? The thing about mathematics is that it doesn’t become particularly easy if you don’t know anything. If you imagine a growing sphere

Compared to Gauss or Erdős? The thing about mathematics is that it doesn’t become particularly easy if you don’t know anything. If you imagine a growing sphere of mathematical knowledge then things in the middle might have been discovered but the surface area of the edge grows as that happens. Sure Euler could do random crazy algebra things that no one had thought of but I don’t think he was in a position to invent Gaussian curvature. Erdős did a lot of combinatorics and graph theory and Ramsay theory which, apart from the latter, are full of questions that are easy to state and which plenty of people might have thought of, and yet which weren’t solved until he came along. There’s also the possibility of discovering a new proof of an old result which he did a bit.