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The low hanging fruit argument only takes you so far. How many other mathematicians in his epoch or before were able to pick as many low hanging fruits as him?


By all means he was a crazy outlier generational genius. A few others in history, like Archimedes and Newton, have been accused of "not leaving anything for anyone else to discover" as well. The question was: why do we not seem to see these crazy outliers anymore? The answer is certainly not that truly exceptional people simply stopped being born after the year 1800. The nature of what it could mean to "know everything" about a field has completely changed.


Also they lived in a time with far less education and communication.

Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus simultaneously. If calculus were a hot new idea now, dozens or hundreds of people would be discovering it simultaneously.

Look at NN/LLM AI for an example.




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