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Adding my voice to this too. I have a PhD in Differential Geometry and would consider myself to have been a decent student and researcher. The "good" people in
by laingc 5y ago
Adding my voice to this too. I have a PhD in Differential Geometry and would consider myself to have been a decent student and researcher. The "good" people in my field were more than a head and shoulders above me, and the "great" people were somewhere off in the stratosphere.
The nature of Mathematics is that the potential depth of understanding and progress is essentially infinite, which frees truly spectacular minds from the constraints they would experience in other fields.
- octopoc 5y agoIs that because the "good" people in your field were just way more obsessive about the topic? I feel like there are some topics that I'm obsessed with that I'm so much more informed on than most people in my field that I can run circles around them. They would call me super smart if the things I'm obsessive about mattered. Sometimes they have mattered. But I know better than to talk about them at length because people get bored.