Comments on: Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

By: Pierre

Pierre — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:01:00 +0000

I put a post 2 years ago, and I am happy to see that it is still active.
I totally agree with Terence Tao, but too me, this question is like:
is it necessary to be tall to play basket ball. Well, look at the size of the international players…

By: vadim

vadim — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:34:38 +0000

As other commenters I also agree with the post. But one cannot deny that there are differences between equally educated people, even if they put the same amount of effort. Usually these differences are marginal, but they still exist and sometimes are noticable. This happens of course not only in math.

By: 转载：做数学家必须是天才吗？ « CodeWay:我的博客

转载：做数学家必须是天才吗？ « CodeWay:我的博客 — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:04:15 +0000

[...] 原文地址:Does one have to be a genius to do maths? 中文翻译:做数学一定要是天才吗？ [...]

By: cnPhil » 做数学与做学问

cnPhil » 做数学与做学问 — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:43:45 +0000

[...] 老师在他的博客上写过一篇文章, “Does one have to be a genius to do maths”, Zhiqiang [...]

By: amlan chakraboty

amlan chakraboty — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:05:38 +0000

Brother! I am a lot interested in mathematics especially im geometry and trigonometry.I am an undergraduate (class-9) and I wish to win medals at Imos’and become a mathematician. . But when I think about it as a career I feel it queer because in India very less relevance is given to post graduate and research mathematics.What do I do??

By: Jess Porter

Jess Porter — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:25:52 +0000

Excellent Article:

I have been reading [mostly applied],math books for 20+ years.

I am a member of SIAM and a local Mathematica users group.

I have 5 or 6 years of college, but never got my degree.

Math Rocks!

Jess

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:41:59 +0000

If you really had an iq of 180 you wouldn’t be calling it rather high. If you got a score of 180 off the internet then don’t trust it, IQ is defined with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. That means you would have to be in the most intelligent 300 or so people in the world to have an IQ that high. Also IQ tests are silly anyway.

By: Enseñar cálculo con base en probabilidad y otras cositas « Probabilidad y ciencia

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:50:00 +0000

[...] Es más, el mismísimo Terry Tao, con toda su innegable genialidad, así lo sostiene (véanse esta, esta, esta y esta entradas de su blog, por ejemplo). Tao no es solo su genialidad, de hecho él es [...]

By: abhishekparab

abhishekparab — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:40:07 +0000

I have read this post more than 20 times and yet, every time I read it, I am inspired to do more Maths!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:31:02 +0000

I personally subscribe to this theory.

http://www.paulcooijmans.com/genius/genius.html

In my opinion this theory is simply great, it of course includes intelligence and associative horizon which is considered to be innate and decided at birth, but also includes another important facet considered indispensable for genius. That is conscientiousness. In a very crude manner conscientiousness can be summed up as ‘working hard’.

I have found this to best model of genius so far, of course one not need to take his hard ‘nature’ approach, but even with that approach it still leaves much room open for hard work to play its role, but perhaps we can temper this with something else Cooijman writes.

“The general under-valuation of intelligence in modern society may be more due to the intellectuals’ failure to recognize the value of intelligence than to the attitude of the greater public. It’s like with money; it’s always the rich who say “money doesn’t bring happiness”. Never the poor. With intelligence, it’s the intelligent who often say “intelligence isn’t everything, we are really all equal”. But the dumb know better.”