What made Newton, Einstein and Riemann geniuses: IQ or creativity?

[Edin_Dzeko]

Solely genetic, then?

Naah. Just work hard in life that's all. This "born with it", "not born with it" isn't going to get anyone anywhere. We all have to put in work one way or the other no one can escape that.

 

[Violinist]

Though i must say there are people with mental disorders which turns out to help their learning abilities (even though they have hard time with their social abilities)
Things like asperger's syndrome is not unheard of

 

[Nano-Passion]

Hey, I just want everyone to know that I appreciate the time they took to post. I've read this a long while ago but frankly I don't have much substance to add.

Agreed.

I always found it interesting to hear of child math prodigies, and then to never hear of them again. There seems to be a limit to the progress of human understanding, and it doesn't matter at all if you hit that limit at 5 or 14 or 70. Most people never hit that limit, and those that do aren't really guaranteed that they'll make any further progress. I suppose quite a few prominent scientists made it to that level early, simply because the sciences had always interested them and that's just what their lives were always about, but I see no reason why it be necessary that you win IMO gold or other prestigious achievements to make real scientific progress.

I always found that a bit interesting because it shows there are other factors that come in.

Well of course there was something special about Newton and Euler, but I have no doubt that there are thousands of mathematicians alive who could outperform both in "Intelligence" tests and Mathematical Olympiads. They had the right skills, at the right time. Newton didn't invent gravity, his work was the culmination of nearly 1000 years of thought in the natural sciences. He didn't even "invent" calculus, i mean the concept of infintismals was considered by archimedes. Many still believe that it is to Leibniz we owe for the calculus. Even so, neither mathematician put the work on a rigorous grounding, it worked but Newton did not understand why it did so. It took the development of the limit and other great mathematicians to do so.

My point is, none of us live in a vacuum. In the future we should put the smartest child on Earth determined by genetics, on an isolated island in the pacific and come back in 20/30years and see if he has formulated a new string theory.

Yes, its unbelievable how many people don't stop and think about this.

Who cares how they did on tests. I want to know more about how they approached everyday tasks: doing the dishes, cleaning, logistics, organization, etc. In one of Feynman's biographies he talked about little things that he wanted to change in certain tasks to make them better. It wasn't only physics, he saw things different in everything in life. That's most fascinating to me.

I agree! Thing is though its hard to find a good amount of detail of that sort.

Best response so far. This discussion is really pointless.

Even if you were a 4 time gold medal winner at the IMO and started taking grad courses at 15, there is no guarantee you will live up to the hype in math. Yes you will probably be good, but not certainly a modern Euler Gauss or Newton.

Not necessarily; I got a lot out of it, and I'm sure others will too.