* It's said he didn't speak till he was (I forget) ~8. I'd believe it - speech develops at different times, and I doubt it has any reflection on adult intelligence.
* He joked that his math wasn't very good. That makes him modest, not a bad student.
* He didn't know how to do the math for non-Euclidian, to develop general relativity (though he did have a vague idea that he needed a curved space, and what it meant, and he vaguely remembered doing it at uni - which shows he wasn't too ignorant), and had a friend help him get up to speed.
* He was probably not the sharpest mathematician in the room, once he was famous enough that every room he walked into would quickly become crowded with the sharpest mathematicians in the world.
* He may not have really liked school, but he obviously liked learning.
Most importantly, everyone likes to think that you can succeed without trying.
He was probably not the sharpest mathematician in the room, once he was famous enough that every room he walked into would quickly become crowded with the sharpest mathematicians in the world.
This, I can't help thinking, would be a good problem to have :)
To summarize a post above, his math indeed wasn't very good (or at least very advanced) for a research-level mathematician because he was a physicist, not a mathematician.
* It's said he didn't speak till he was (I forget) ~8. I'd believe it - speech develops at different times, and I doubt it has any reflection on adult intelligence.
* He joked that his math wasn't very good. That makes him modest, not a bad student.
* He didn't know how to do the math for non-Euclidian, to develop general relativity (though he did have a vague idea that he needed a curved space, and what it meant, and he vaguely remembered doing it at uni - which shows he wasn't too ignorant), and had a friend help him get up to speed.
* He was probably not the sharpest mathematician in the room, once he was famous enough that every room he walked into would quickly become crowded with the sharpest mathematicians in the world.
* He may not have really liked school, but he obviously liked learning.
Most importantly, everyone likes to think that you can succeed without trying.