[gcanyon]

Once upon a time I was good at math -- like, win state-wide competitions, get a scholarship good. It's sad that I can easily follow the path laid out here, but I am nowhere close to being able to lay out this course on my own.

[dmurray]

Nobody can do this on their own. You don't get to do this by having a great aptitude for high school maths and then being exposed to one or two more concepts that just intuitively click - which is enough to be competitive at the level you describe, though not enough to make the US Olympiad team.

You get the level of understanding necessary to create this blog post by already having worked through several textbooks and papers on number theory, elliptic curves, etc. So you don't do it on your own, you do it with help from Poincaré and Euler and Diophantes and whoever else.

Based on your description, you absolutely have the aptitude to do this if you pursued maths further academically. And also by having great teaching and explaining skills - that part might be harder to learn.

[patapong]

The picture says 95% are unable to solve this - I wonder what the correct percentage is. Closer to 99.999% I would guess, based on your explanation.

[amenghra]

Originally, more like 99.999995%

[gcanyon]

As an aside, I once worked with an IMO bronze medalist and a gold medalist. They were scary smart. And then there's the fact that I once got to talk with Erdős. I wish I had known to take that opportunity more seriously.

[ysofunny]

you seem to be missing this idea that mathematics must be doable alone, individually

this appears to be what sets mathematics appart from science? I mean, it's not like Euler, or Poincaré, and so on, are really there with you when "doing math"

point being, mathematics is not a team game. but everything else is??

[gus_massa]

When I'm teaching congruence or the Gauss method to solve equation systems, I tell my students: "You can solve the midterm alone or with the ghost of Gauss sit on the side chair."

[jerf]

I like that. "Standing on the shoulder of giants" is a fairly common way to phrase this, and it captures truth as well, but "on a team with the greatest mathematicians of history" is pretty fun too.

Pity I'm by far the weakest link in such team-ups. :)

[mcphage]

> point being, mathematics is not a team game. but everything else is??

Sorry, it’s early, and I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. I hope you are? Mathematics is very much a team game.

[celticninja]

i think based on the username they seem to be looking for validation through upvotes. Perhaps assuming this place is like a nerdier reddit.

[ysofunny]

actually, reddit is a mainstream hacker news

to me old.reddit.com will always be reddit.com

[celticninja]

Ah I never changed from old.reddit, I am sure the current version is entirely unrecognisable. It throws me sometimes when a comment mentions a users pfp, because wtf? Reddit doesn't have user profiles with pictures.