Kids are very cognitively flexible; it is school with its multiple choice tasks, regimental learning, and compartmentalization of subjects that has scorched that flexibility, that creativity, that inherent ability to see the world outside of single disciplinary boundaries … see it polymathically.

In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of 30 or 35 years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set ou