I think ideas like "Oh, that guy was a genius. Normal people could never do that." are fundamentally misguided. He worked tirelessly on mathematics, filling not

I think ideas like "Oh, that guy was a genius. Normal people could never do that." are fundamentally misguided. He worked tirelessly on mathematics, filling notebooks in his spare time for the pure joy of it. If you can find somebody else with that kind of devotion to mathematics who is hopelessly average at it, that would be something. I mentioned Ramanujan because he's famous, and he obviously didn't get it from taking university classes. I used to do math competitions in high school, and I'd meet the best students in the state or country. You know what? All of us learned the same way Ramanujan did: we read number theory books for fun, continually asked questions that were interesting to us, and then worked on them until we answered them. Not a single person in the group learned by attending lectures or even through supervision by experts. It's just not how it happens. That's the point I was trying to make concisely before.