Weirdest Maths

David Darling & Agnijo Banerjee

7 annotations • data

First annotation on Jan 17th, 2026. Last on Jan 18th, 2026.

Introduction

Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire. – Bernard Williams
I am truly a lone traveller and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…
Of course, that wasn't really true. Einstein cared deeply about maths and physics – just not always those aspects or problems presented to him as part of his formal education.
In his 1940 memoir, A Mathematician's Apology, G. H. Hardy wrote: 'No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game.' Hardy's sentiment is commonly extended to include physics, especially theoretical physics, which is highly mathematical. Certainly there are many examples to bolster the argument – Einstein being a case in point. His genius burned intensely for a dozen or so years after the turn of the century, but then flickered out.
Various factors, it seems, contribute to what we call genius and the forms it may take: speed of thought (at which von Neumann, by all accounts, was exceptional), depth of understanding (at which, according to Wigner, Einstein excelled), originality, creativity, and so forth.
Of von Neumann he wrote: Johnny's unique gift as a mathematician was to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of logic. He was able to see intuitively the logical essence of problems and then to use the simple rules of logic to solve the problems.
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable. – Mark Twain