How to diagnose a genius by Wilhelm Ostwald (1909) by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-21 +Created 1970-01-01
From the abstract:Ciro Santilli couldn't agree more... notably students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
Much money, his student went on to say, is spent by various Governments in attempting to discover those people whose thorough education may be expected to bring in a return of value to the State, and the question how best to discover latent genius is an eminently practical one. After cogitation, Prof. Ostwald came to the conclusion that it is those students who cannot be kept on the rails - that is, who are not contented with methodical teaching - who have within them the seeds of genius
I was trying to learn about how some types of quantum computers work, when I came across this pearl:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Paul#Scientific_results Wolfgang Paul, 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, referred to Wolfgang Pauli, 1945 winner, as his "imaginary part".
The China front was of course the Russia front this time: stackoverflow.com/users/895245 (web.archive.org/web/20220322230513/https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/ciro-santilli-Путлер-Капут-六四事)
Some further comments at: Section "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead".
Related:
The opposite of idealism.
And that is the whole point.
The outcome of that however is that you have to learn how to explain what you've achieved to others and why it is awesome.
Just like in the real world.
You have to create portfolio, and do some public relations.
With major mathematicians holding ideas such as:it is not surprise that the state of STEM education is so shit as of 2020, especially at the the missing link between basic and advanced! This also implies that the number of people that can appreciate any advanced mathematics research is tiny, and consequently so is the funding.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.
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