Tiling with Three Polygons Is Undecidable

Every year we hear about some kid who is "smarter than Einstein and Hawking" but for the most part, we never hear about them again. Child prodigies that turn into extraordinary adults seem to be rare. If you were to ask me to name some, the only one I'd be able to name off hand would be Stephen Wolfram. That here is another one is of interest even if it is of little consequence to his current accomplishments.

I think the bar has been raised. As science has progressed and evolved, all the "low hanging fruit" has been picked.

As an example, take Dijkstra's algorithm. It's far from the only thing that he is known for and I am by no means trying to diminish his accomplishments but how many people really tried to solve that problem before him?

I might be subject to some kind of fallacy or bias but I feel like if I'd never heard of Dijkstra and was presented with the task to find the shortest path between two nodes in a graph I could have come up with that algorithm. Maybe not in the first day but eventually at least.

It's that whole "standing on the shoulders of Giants" thing. The giants allow us to see further by learning from and building on their work, but they also picked a lot of the low hanging fruits in their career. Sure they left a lot of things undone but they probably picked out the juiciest lowest hanging fruits first and most of the ones left are either less juicy or higher up or both.

As this effect continues we end up in a situation where simply getting to the point where one can begin to push the boundaries of a specific field takes decades of learning from these giants before us, and now we're millions of people all looking for those juicy low hanging fruits while there's hardly any fruit left on the tree at all.

All that to say I think it's unfair to compare modern researchers to Einstein and similar giants. Making a revolutionary discovery like these men have done is possibly less a matter of raw intelligence and more a matter of circumstance. You need the right people in the right place with the right people around them and the funding for it and so on.

Maybe Archimedes was not so smart after all. Especially since he was forced to think.

I'm not saying they're not smart, I'm saying it takes more than just a smart man. If Einstein was born in Africa to a family barely scraping by, and never got an education do you think he'd have come up with his theory of relativity? That's a rhetorical question, it's pretty much just a fact that he wouldn't. So you need the genius, you need the education and all the other social infrastructure, lots of circumstance.

Also I'm saying that nobody can come up with the theory of relativity again. That big juicy fruit is picked. I'm not saying it was low hanging, but it also wasn't at the top of the tree. Maybe if someone else figured out relativity and Einstein was born 40 years ago he would just be another relatively unknown physicist today. Maybe he'd have figured out some other amazing revolutionary thing, who knows. He certainly wouldn't have been the one to figure out relativity if it had already been done.