> All of these people hire IMO Gold Medallists etc, and after a point there are diminishing returns on intelligence, someone who won IMO gold is not that much b

> All of these people hire IMO Gold Medallists etc, and after a point there are diminishing returns on intelligence, someone who won IMO gold is not that much better than someone who got silver in intelligence. Being an IMO gold medallist doesn't make someone a good mathematician; there's a very big difference between the kind of math in the IMO and the kind of mathematical research a successful mathematician does. Jim Simons was an extremely successful mathematician, who won a Millenium Prize, and hired mathematicians and physicists with a strong publication history. There's a quote from someone at Rentech like: "We hire the A-grade mathematicians. Other firms hire the B or C-grade mathematicians, and don't even know the A-grade mathematicians exist". It's like, if a startup hired a bunch of fresh CS Olympiad Gold Medalists straight out of university, do you think they'd be able to compete with Google (especially Google of 10 years ago, when its search was still so dominant)?