étais basé où

? À Paris, à l'origine.

Mais on avait ouvert un bureau à New York, on avait des premiers clients américains.

Et en fin 2019, j'ai pris la décision avec ma compagne et notre...

Enfin, on avait un enfant qui avait...

Enfin, on en a deux maintenant, mais à l'époque, on en avait un qui avait six mois.

Et on avait décidé de partir à New York pour aider au développement américain.

Et donc...

T'avais à, à ce moment-là en tête un jour, tu serais écrivain ou finalement, c'était passé un peu en arrière ?

J'ai toujours rêvé que...

En fait, j'ai toujours eu l'impression qu'il y avait des choses qui se passaient dans ma tête, que je trouvais hyper fortes émotionnellement, hyper intéressantes et que j'arrivais pas à les dire.

Donc cette impression de ne pas arriver à dire les choses qui étaient vraiment importantes pour moi remonte à l'enfance.

Et je crois que c'est ça qui m'a fasciné dans la littérature.

Euh, et, et mes premiers chocs intellectuels étaient des chocs de, de lecture, tout simplement.

Mais j'avais cette idée, je sais pas d'où elle venait, qu'on pouvait pas écrire des choses intéressantes quand on était trop jeune.

Mais pour qu'on puisse un petit peu comprendre le type de maths que tu faisais, peut-être, est-ce que déjà, tu peux nous parler de s'il y a un cours en particulier qui t'a marqué à l'époque et si c'est ça qui t'a mené à faire, euh, à étudier ce que t'as choisi de, de creuser après ?

Because if we've been so off for twenty-three hundred years, and yet we've produced Grothendieck and Terence Tao and, and Hilbert and so forth, and neural nets and et cetera, then that means that the foundations of math weren't terribly important to understand from a philosophical or cognitive standpoint anyhow."

So th-there's two different directions.

Um, Grothendieck did not need anyone to teach him mathematics, in a way.

And that's a phenomenon that's very typical of mathematics.

If you, if you ask the top mathematician, they, they will all tell you that, of course, yes, they learned very important thing at school, and there are this great teacher or maybe this parent or maybe this book they read that, you know, was very inspiring.

But they also feel that there is something about their own mathematical practice that is something they learned by themselves.

And, um, I, I, I don't think that, uh, anything I'm, I've been writing can help produce new Ramanujans and new Grothendiecks.

Mm-hmm.

Y- you confess in the piece, which I love, that you had a horse in this race that, that, that bothered you.

Yes, so I, I think it's really important to, to frame the debate in the correct term, because one thing I, I, I noticed since I started publicly discussing about math talent and its origins is people try to pigeonhole into one of the two extremes.

One extreme would be everything is genetically determined, and there is nothing you can do to change your destiny.

And the other supposed, uh, opposed, uh, position would be the blank slates.

Like, everything is open, and you can become whatever you want.

I do not believe in any of these extremes, and I think it's really important because I think that, uh, many of your listeners are hearing the first sentences of, of your introduction, and we think: Oh, no, not another guy who will pretend that genes don't matter at all.

Of course, they matter.

In the design of these studies, what were some of the problems?

Talk about Hardy and Ramanujan.

Yeah, so Hardy and Ramanujan is- is- i- i- they- they- they look like, um, characters from a comedy.

It- it's- it's impossible to get people like that in real life normally.

So Hardy was a very typical highbrow, uh, high class mathematician from Cambridge, and he had, um, a very big chair in Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century and he was one of the prophets of the formal rev- formalist revolution at the beginning of the 20th cent- century.

He was a friend of Russell, and he was advocating, uh, the reformation of mathematics to go to- towards more and more logical, uh, formal proofs.

And one day, he received, in the mail, a letter coming from India from a guy he had never heard about, Ramanujan, saying, "Okay, I'm just a poor..." It's really, it- it looked like Hollywood scripts.

"I'm just a, uh, a poor employee in India.

Yeah.