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.