plenty of people are very good at math but never produce any technical writing on scientific journals
Fair enough! Its just that, unless they produce technical results, or pass graduate exams or do something else tangible its quite hard to distinguish people who are very good at math from people who are not.
his story seems to strongly imply that his past self wouldn’t have been able to pass those math classes
Obviously its hard to tell from that interview, but he seems to suggest that the reason he didn’t pass his classes was because he spent time partying, bodybuilding and ‘chasing girls’ rather than studying. It doesn’t necessarily seem like he would have been unable to pass the classes, just unwilling to put in the work. Even after he became interested in math, he still admitted to struggling with some of the classes, but he had the willpower to put in the work to understand it.
I think that your description of it being a change in ‘math attitude’ is a good one. It seems like his attitude (and willingness to persevere) changed, but not necessarily his ability.
Just to be clear: I think its super interesting that someone can have this kind of a change and it is interesting to study it! I’m just not convinced that it is a change in math ability.
Fair enough! Its just that, unless they produce technical results, or pass graduate exams or do something else tangible its quite hard to distinguish people who are very good at math from people who are not.
Obviously its hard to tell from that interview, but he seems to suggest that the reason he didn’t pass his classes was because he spent time partying, bodybuilding and ‘chasing girls’ rather than studying. It doesn’t necessarily seem like he would have been unable to pass the classes, just unwilling to put in the work. Even after he became interested in math, he still admitted to struggling with some of the classes, but he had the willpower to put in the work to understand it.
I think that your description of it being a change in ‘math attitude’ is a good one. It seems like his attitude (and willingness to persevere) changed, but not necessarily his ability.
Just to be clear: I think its super interesting that someone can have this kind of a change and it is interesting to study it! I’m just not convinced that it is a change in math ability.