[mayankkaizen]

Which other theoretical physicists were amazingly great at mathematics? I am genuinly curious.

I am certainly not alluding that Einstein was great at maths. But I do think he was good enough.

von Neuman is someone I think was a beast but he was more of a mathrmatician than a physicist (at least I think so).

[thedailymail]

I'm not an expert by any means, but my understanding is that Dirac was a highly accomplished mathematician, and of course Hilbert made his name in mathematics before moving to study physics.

[mjreacher]

Dirac came from a later generation than Einstein. For example during Einstein's annus mirabilis (1905) I doubt very many physicists knew of tensor calculus considering it was only developed a decade beforehand. During that time the mathematics physicists learnt was very much the traditional topics of analysis: series expansions, special functions, integral equations, calculus of variations, quadratic forms and of course partial differential equations. Hilbert himself actually wrote a textbook with Richard Courant covering these topics: Methods of Mathematical Physics. As such I don't really think many physicists of Einstein's generation knew lots of mathematics simply because it wasn't taught at the time. In the decades since physicists gradually has generally become more "mathematised" so to speak. In Dirac's generation tensor calculus and group representation theory became important, than in general abstract algebra and functional analysis, then as differential geometry became more well developed that gets taught and closer to the modern day you can find top theoretical physics students learning all sorts of abstract mathematics like algebraic topology.