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0 pointsaleph_minus_one2y ago0 comments

> EDIT: Generally when people are "true geniuses" their _peers_ identify them as such.

Counterexample: Kurt Heegener. OK, not a genius, but nevertheless a mathematician whose proof of a deep result (class number 1 problem [1]) was not accepted by his peers

Quote from [2]:

"In 1952, he published the Stark–Heegner theorem which he claimed was the solution to a classic number theory problem proposed by the great mathematician Gauss, the class number 1 problem. Heegner's work was not accepted for years, mainly due to his quoting of a portion of Heinrich Martin Weber's work that was known to be incorrect (though he never used this result in the proof)."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Class_number_prob...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurt_Heegner&oldi...

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jcgrillo2y ago

This is interesting, I wasn't aware. Thank you! What I was (maybe snarkily) trying to evoke was e.g. how the way Hans Bethe spoke about Richard Feynman contrasts with how Freeman Dyson speaks about Stephen Wolfram, or Cosma Shalizi's review of A New Kind of Science. It's obviously not universally true that everyone accepts or understands a scientist's work in their time, but it's not often that a scientific "genius" is widely regarded as a crackpot among their scientific contemporaries. Extraordinary claims, etc etc.

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