[arturkane7]

The title is less surprising if you consider that straight after dropping out to be a poet (in high school) he effectively started getting one to one tutoring from a field medalist for three years in his late teens to early 20s, to practically living with the medalist.

[aidepast]

Perhaps unrelated, but I wonder who these mentors were in the case of people like da Vinci, Socrates, Archimedes, Newton et al. They must have had some adults who guided them toward what they're known for. It seems absurd to believe that they just happened to grow up like that. It's as if everybody today, once you skim the "Early Life" section, it turns out had something fantastic, like a mother who was a Fields medalist, or uncle who invented this or that. The more that I see, the more I'm of the opinion that "genius" is simply:

1. effort, usually from youth, that nobody knows about so it appears to be innate

2. the effort is motivated and guided by some mentor(s), usually people with serious qualifications, like your Fields medalist uncle deciding to take you under his wing, after you said "math is fun :D" one time at 7 years old when he told you his job was "to do math :)" upon you asking him as children like to do, and turn you into a Fields-winning adult

This reminds me of those people who pretend they're a genius because they can guess the day of the week if you give them a date, when the reality is that anybody can learn to do that because it's just an algorithm[1] that you can calculate in your head and practice to the point that you come off as if you have a photographic memory or something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule

[lioeters]

As well as mentors, we should consider the environment in which genius arose, their cultural context and influences, the zeitgeist, intellectual atmosphere, schools, parents, friends, colleagues, the books they read.

I think we overvalue the uniqueness of the individual in this hero worship of the lonely genius, as if a flower is independent of the earth from which it grows.

But then again, it's true that there are exceptional stars, singular phenomena that cannot be explained by the sum of its parts. I suppose that leap, the surprising distance between what was given and what the individual made of it, is what we call genius, talent, luck or hard work.

[Nevermark]

I think there is a tremendous variety across all of us, in the abstractions we each have learned in order to “understand” our environments.

We can see common evidence of this in how every person we know differs in their general abilities across different problem areas.

But we are so used to that we are probably under aware of how differently we may all think.

Potential geniuses would be people whose internal abstractions are uncommon and happen to fit important under-solved problem areas.

If their uncommon insights are paired with healthy brain biology, a drive to identify and solve interesting problems, and some luck, we get a genius.

[Gooblebrai]

Totally agree. And let's not forget the importance of timing. Those genius will thrive in specific economic contexts and political scenarios

[TechBro8615]

While upbringing ("nurture") is clearly a critical component to success in any specialized field, there is undeniably a "nature" component as well, and I doubt that the best nurture could overcome lack of natural talent anymore than natural talent could overcome lack of nurture. To be the best you need a lot of both.

It's more obvious in athletics, where there is clearly natural talent, but the equalizer is the support network of parents funding practice, driving to games, getting into competitive leagues, etc. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to intellectual talents as well, even if the differences in natural talent are less obvious than in athletics.

[petermcneeley]

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristoc...

[OneDonOne]

Yes, but then comes the question - who mentored.the mentor?

[tzs]

It was at least 6 years after dropping out in high school that he met Hironaka. From Huh's Fields medal interview with the International Mathematical Union [1]:

> Soon after finishing college, I had the good fortune to meet Professor Heisuke Hironaka

[1] https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Fields/2022/H...

[wwarner]

I took the point to be that the skill of making progress on open questions is very different from the skill of quickly mastering established facts.

[ramblerman]

It’s still surprising, but I agree, worth mentioning.

Although I don’t think a field medalist would waste his time with an untalented youth. He obviously saw something.

[moralestapia]

>I don’t think a field medalist would waste his time with an untalented youth.

Ugh. Do you think a Fields medalist would "waste" his time cleaning his bedroom? Folding his clothes?

1. The world is much more menial than you think it is.

2. Fields medalists are, unsurprisingly, human beings, and keep doing human stuff like making new friends just for fun.

3. Not everyone is living under the weird delusion/obsession where all outcomes have to be maximally favorable for "life to be worth it". Not all companies have to be billion dollar companies. Not all students have to go and win Fields medals.

4. The "untalented youth" is much more interesting than what you give them credit for.

[arturkane7]

I didn’t meant it in a way to diminish how clever he is. Just the bit about dropping out is overstated relative to what came straight after.

[linhvn]

Yes, it was lucky that he was tutored my a Fields medalist. But he did the hard work to get himself tutored: sitting in an algebraic geometry class (that saw attendances dropping from 200 to 5 within a few weeks), reaching out to the professor, traveling with him for 2 years, etc. And then he still needed to do all the work himself for his PhD, and so forth.

[user_named]

He got paid

[twilight7k]

That makes sense because getting into top uni like SNU is hard enough as it is. I was wondering how a dropout was able to pull it off. Nautral talent plus hardwork and good mentoring was all in there.

[ak_111]

It probably helps a lot to grow in an academic household, seems his dad was a stats professor and his mom a linguistic one, his informal math education growing up and work discipline must have been way above average. I bet he was a straight A math student.

[quacked]

> I was wondering how a dropout was able to pull it off. Nautral talent plus hardwork and good mentoring was all in there.

"Formal education" is just industrialized mentoring and compelled hard work. Dropouts and "uneducated" people built the world. If you work hard and have good mentors, you can do anything, whether it's in a school or not.

(While I am vehemently opposed to the modern method of education, I don't think that formal education in a classroom setting is inherently bad, nor do I think most people today have the social support, intellect, or temperament necessary to drop out and still be successful.)

[atlantic]

From the description, I don't think the term "tutoring" covers it. It was more in the nature of a master-disciple relation, such as is found in Japanese traditional arts. That was the transformational moment in his life.

[karaterobot]

Is it? Give me the full attention of a Fields medalist for any number of years and it will not make me a Fields medalist.

[TechBro8615]

I think OP is merely suggesting that the tutelage of a Fields medalist had more to do with the subsequent Fields medal than did the poetry. I didn't read the comment as diminishing the accomplishments or suggesting anyone could do the same if they just had the right tutor. It was clarifying the title that misleadingly implies a causal relationship between poetry and math, or that he somehow stopped studying yet succeeded anyway.

[AtlasBarfed]

Well it was a poet and just decided to take introduction algebraic structures with a fields metal winner?

There's a lot of liberties taken by the pseudo biographical articles, especially when they're dealing with the gee whiz genius trope in American media which is really annoying.

It's really just anti-intellectualisn cloaked to something else.