I used to tell people that the title character of the film Good Will Hunting didn’t strike me as very believable — not because of the self-taught janitor’s ability to do cutting-edge research, but because of his contempt for his own work. At one point in the movie, having shown his mentor a proof he’s just written, he sneers “Do you know how easy this is for me?” and sets the proof on fire with his cigarette lighter — at which point his mentor, a world-class mathematician with a Fields Medal to his name, dives onto the carpet not so much to prevent the building from burning down (buildings can be rebuilt, after all) as much as to rescue a proof that the mathematical world will cherish.
“That’s a teenager’s idea of what being a genius is like,” I would tell people.
“Oh, and are you a genius?” one woman once asked me skeptically.
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