cancel2 2022
Canceled
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He was an excellent maths student (number 1 in his class) all the way through school until he stopped attending classes in college.
He wrote a PROOF of the Pythagoream Theorem at 12. Taught himself calculus at 13 and scored near perfect scores on the maths and physics portion of his college entry exam (at 16, when the minimum age to get into the school was 18).
He was the number 1 student in his physics program 2 years into his college program and simply stopped going to all his math classes (because he thought he didnt need advance mathematics for physics) and eventually stopped going to all his physics classes (because they weren’t teaching Maxwell’s equations).
His paper on Brownian Motion - which he should’ve won a Nobel prize for (Jean Perrin won it simply for experimentally proving it) has an astonishingly brilliant bit of pure mathematics (read it, it’s genius).
And after teaching David Hilbert, one of the 10 greatest mathematicians of all time, the physical parameters of General Relativity, the race for the final Field Equations boiled down to pure mathematics…and Einstein beat him to it:
(From Cal Tech Physics Professor Daniel Kennefick: “Why then do the centenary celebrations mention Einstein only and omit Hilbert almost completely?
One reason is that in the late 1990s a historian working on Hilbert named Leo Corry made a remarkable discovery. He found a copy of the proofs of Hilbert’s paper, with a printers stamp dating it to December 6, 1915. These proofs show that Hilbert made significant changes to the paper after this date. In addition, the proofs do not contain the Einstein equations.” )
He has plenty of other work showing his complete command of mathematical physics, but he didn’t have any real passion for pure mathematics and it showed. His obsessed and first love was always physics. Minkowski, a mathematics genius himself, is said to have remarked that Einstein wasted his talent in math because he never went to class. He also called him a “lazy dog” for constantly skipping class.
Einstein himself remarked that he did not think advanced mathematics was necessary for breakthroughs in physics - this is logical once you consider how easy, relatively speaking, integral and differential calculus is compared to the tensor calculus/differential geometry required for General Relativity. It’s like comparing a Lamborghini to a Ford Focus. Einstein reasoned, if Newton could explain the universe with relatively simple math (calculus), why couldn’t he?
Alas, as Einstein learned, the universe speaks to us in the language of advanced mathematics - and I think had he been as passionate about math as he was physics, he would’ve been a mathematical god. In my graduate program, we spent half of the semester learning the mathematical tools to understand General Relativity. And this is 100 years later. It is so mathematically complex that even years after learning it, graduate students - many of whom are gifted - still struggle with it (the Einstein Field Equations can be solved in so many different ways, it’s hard). Ironically, academic physics today is so heavily mathematical…because of Einstein.
https://www.quora.com/Did-Einstein-suck-at-mathematics
He was an excellent maths student (number 1 in his class) all the way through school until he stopped attending classes in college.
He wrote a PROOF of the Pythagoream Theorem at 12. Taught himself calculus at 13 and scored near perfect scores on the maths and physics portion of his college entry exam (at 16, when the minimum age to get into the school was 18).
He was the number 1 student in his physics program 2 years into his college program and simply stopped going to all his math classes (because he thought he didnt need advance mathematics for physics) and eventually stopped going to all his physics classes (because they weren’t teaching Maxwell’s equations).
His paper on Brownian Motion - which he should’ve won a Nobel prize for (Jean Perrin won it simply for experimentally proving it) has an astonishingly brilliant bit of pure mathematics (read it, it’s genius).
And after teaching David Hilbert, one of the 10 greatest mathematicians of all time, the physical parameters of General Relativity, the race for the final Field Equations boiled down to pure mathematics…and Einstein beat him to it:
(From Cal Tech Physics Professor Daniel Kennefick: “Why then do the centenary celebrations mention Einstein only and omit Hilbert almost completely?
One reason is that in the late 1990s a historian working on Hilbert named Leo Corry made a remarkable discovery. He found a copy of the proofs of Hilbert’s paper, with a printers stamp dating it to December 6, 1915. These proofs show that Hilbert made significant changes to the paper after this date. In addition, the proofs do not contain the Einstein equations.” )
He has plenty of other work showing his complete command of mathematical physics, but he didn’t have any real passion for pure mathematics and it showed. His obsessed and first love was always physics. Minkowski, a mathematics genius himself, is said to have remarked that Einstein wasted his talent in math because he never went to class. He also called him a “lazy dog” for constantly skipping class.
Einstein himself remarked that he did not think advanced mathematics was necessary for breakthroughs in physics - this is logical once you consider how easy, relatively speaking, integral and differential calculus is compared to the tensor calculus/differential geometry required for General Relativity. It’s like comparing a Lamborghini to a Ford Focus. Einstein reasoned, if Newton could explain the universe with relatively simple math (calculus), why couldn’t he?
Alas, as Einstein learned, the universe speaks to us in the language of advanced mathematics - and I think had he been as passionate about math as he was physics, he would’ve been a mathematical god. In my graduate program, we spent half of the semester learning the mathematical tools to understand General Relativity. And this is 100 years later. It is so mathematically complex that even years after learning it, graduate students - many of whom are gifted - still struggle with it (the Einstein Field Equations can be solved in so many different ways, it’s hard). Ironically, academic physics today is so heavily mathematical…because of Einstein.
https://www.quora.com/Did-Einstein-suck-at-mathematics
