Pity the Poor Mathmo

John Kelley writes

``John Wehausen once told me

Every mathematician, for most of his early life, is the brightest person he knows, and it's a great shock when he finds that there are people who can easily do things that are very hard for him'.

I think that this is true, and that within every mathematician, more-or-less suppressed or laughed-at, is an arrogant little know-it-all.....and simultaneously a stricken child who has been found wanting.''

Recorded in Steven Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha Redux Mathematical Association of America 2005, p 50.

Some of us never make that discovery... Russell wrote of his time in Cambridge...`` For a long time I supposed that somewhere in the university there were really clever people that I had not yet met, and whom I should at once recognise as my intellectual superiors, but during my second year I discovered that I already knew all the cleverest people in the university. This was a great disappointment to me..''

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