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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold and Silver Juniors, Mid-tiers and Producers
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To: koan who wrote (15944)7/12/2006 10:27:38 AM
From: LoneClone  Read Replies (1) of 78419
 
I had a brush with mathematical genius many years ago. (That's not counting the time when, as the best high school chess player in my hometown, I was one of 16 whipped in a simultaneous blindfold exhibition by a chess grandmaster named Duncan Suttles.)

I was a bit of a prodigy myself in my younger days and ended up in university doing a math/physics/chemistry honours degree at age 16.

And I could always do the math without effort. (It has always been my contention, pace Asimov, that you don't so much learn math as realize it, that a certain level of math ability is hard-wired into your brain. This also fits with genius being the ability to see the simplicity in what what others see as complex.)

But when I got to a 4th year course called Symmetry and Geometry -- about n-dimensional rotations and reflections and the like -- I met my comeuppance, as studying like mad only got me a B-.

Clearly the prof was way beyond his students, except for one. This kid, who came to class barefoot with his dog -- well, it was the mid-70s -- and the prof made the rest of us into spectators when they got going. It was awe-inspiring if humbling to see them flit nimbly from point to point that the rest of us barely understood.

I found out later that the kid was one of 16 accepted into a very prestigious graduate programme at an Ivy League university. I wonder how his hippy ways fit in, and where he is now.

I never took another math class. As I had also become disillusioned with the hard sciences, sociology, art history, and communications studies became my fields of study.

LC
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