[solveit]

They are. Or at least, this guy is. Quote from Dieudonne, his doctoral advisor, describing how Grothendieck got his PhD:

>A general theory of duality for locally convex spaces had to be worked out: Schwartz and I had started its study for Fréchet spaces and their direct limits, but we had met a series of problems we could not solve. We therefore proposed them to Grothendieck, and the result turned out to exceed our most sanguine expectations. In less than a year, he had solved all our problems by very ingenious new constructions; then, with the techniques he had developed, he started to work on many other questions in functional analysis.