[nas]

I believe Tim Peters was trained as a mathematician. He is good at analyzing algorithms. Often he will post on the Python lists about the subtleties of floating point behavior. As you say, he read a much of recent research on sorting before coming up with TimSort. He special ability I think is making the "engineering" tradeoffs to come up with an algorithm that works well on real-world data.

[ajbonkoski]

You believe or you know? Nothing I've read suggests that. Please don't advance ideas like that without giving proper justification; this is exactly how myths start.