[toolz]

I have a hard time taking this comment seriously. How am I supposed to equate a drawing any graduate art-school student could reproduce with foundational discoveries in mathematics that have changed the world in ways that quite literally were only imagined in fictional stories before the production of technology that was created on the back of mathematics.

Give me a picasso painting and a year and I guarantee you I could reproduce something indistinguishable to 99% of people. If I gave anybody a year to learn and make mathematical discoveries even 1/100th as impactful as Newton, it's likely no one would come close.

[rabbiteared]

Of course you could reproduce such a painting easily enough. I can also reproduce F = ma ... look, I just did!

Invent an entirely new and impactful style of painting, that hasn't been seen before, from dust. Just like Newton invented a whole new "style" of mathematics.

I still think Picasso is less important but you haven't even begun to draw the correct analogy here.

[vharuck]

>How am I supposed to equate a drawing any graduate art-school student could reproduce with foundational discoveries in mathematics

Pretty sure that's GP's point. Nowadays, any graduate physics student can solve calculus problems. The amazing part is the creation of new ways to see and describe the world.

[toolz]

A year of training would have anyone reproducing picassos art with likely high accuracy. A year of training in calculus is effectively what you have with juniors in high school. To be honest, saying it would take most people a year to reproduce picassos artwork feels very generous. His artwork is not particularly skillful.

[rnjesus]

his point is that the skill does not lie in the manual process of making the art, but in the process of _creating_ the art. copying something (even with a high degree of precision) is less difficult than imagining the thing in the first place.