[lutusp]

> The author lost me at "Mathematical genius resides within every one of us — most people just don’t know it yet."

An unfortunate hyperbolic opening line, the remainder of the article is much better.

> However, saying anyone could be a genius is disingenuous.

But genius isn't an identity, it's a possession. It's often a currency with limited utility. Consider Bill Shockley, Nobel Prizewinner, co-inventor of the transistor -- he possessed a narrow, specific area of genius, held by someone otherwise quite ordinary and even deplorable (he was a racist who lectured on the imagined inferiority of black people).

Consider Henry Ford, inventor of efficient factory methods, but a rabid anti-Semite.

Identifying genius as a possession, not an identity, greatly clarifies its role in our lives. It can keep us from expecting a person to be smart about more than one or two specific things.