[ak_111]

The authors probably didn't meant it, but this is surprisingly realistic of math geniuses (see stories of Grothendieck Prime and Weyl in the following thread)

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/6358/story-of-grothe...

[red_trumpet]

Yeah, finding out if a number is prime or not can be unintuitive. But I doubt Grothendieck would have had trouble with anything divisible by 2 or 5...

[everybodyknows]

My math is rusty enough to find it helpful to explicate that 2*5 is the complete factorization to primes of 10, and our customary arithmetic base for numbers written on the page is likewise 10.

[mock-possum]

I like the Einstein quote about the speed of light - some smartass asked him to recite it, and he’s basically like “I don’t memorize trivial information that’s easily looked up in books”

Could be totally apocryphal, but I like the sentiment.

[samstave]

>“I don’t memorize trivial information that’s easily looked up in books”

holy X

I get accused at having a poor memory A LOT!.

And I constantly tell people, I have a great memory - there are just things I dont choose to commit to memory.

I can tell you every single password I have typed into a machine. FblQ00Ho <--- ix.netcom.com 1996

But I cant tell you WHAT YOU TOLD ME you ate for lunch yesterday and suddenly I am a jerk.

"Why cant you recall what I told you yesterday??!?!?!?"

UH, because thats ephemeral information I dont need to hold in my head?