How To Become a Mathematical Genius - by Sinéad O’Sullivan

What mathematics reveals about intelligence, intuition, and modern failure

TL;DR: What many people experience as a “cognitive limit” or the edges of their own intelligence is actually just a representational limit: it’s when we use a specific way of thinking, but apply it to the wrong types of problems. This makes us think we’re stupid, when actually we’re not! Kandinsky’s Orange I want to go back and admit that I was very wrong about something I wrote in a tweet a couple of years ago, relating to mathematics and our so-called “cognitive limits”: Namely, that I had hit my cognitive limit back in grad school as I tried to muddle my way through multiple PhD math…

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