Danny Calegari seems like that rare combination of humility, insight, and empathy. Some really good quotes in this interview: > If you want to go into mathemat

Danny Calegari seems like that rare combination of humility, insight, and empathy. Some really good quotes in this interview: > If you want to go into mathematics, doing the mathematics itself has to be the thing that’s the reward, because no one cares, and what’s considered important doesn’t always make sense. ... I think 100% of mathematicians think that no one cares, that no one even knows anything about their best work. > G.H. Hardy was once asked what distinguished Ramanujan as a mathematician. One of the things he said was that Ramanujan had a remarkable capacity for coming up with hypotheses very quickly, but that he was also very quick to revise his hypotheses. He was nimble: If something didn’t work, he was able to pivot and revise his way of thinking. > the same kind of psychological pressures that make it difficult for people to deal with failure are at work in making it hard for people to carefully and critically evaluate arguments that they have a huge personal investment in being correct. > One of the great, tremendously useful and valuable functions of good writing is that it gives you a way of seeing what it’s like to be other people. You can see inside people’s heads. This is one of the great gifts of literature: You get to see that everyone else is weird, too, not just you.