Mathamania discussion

einstein once said that he did not now everything because he is smart, but because he spends more time with problems XD

That is true. People who think more carefully is more successful than people who are just smart and don't think very hard.

There's this guy in my grade who goes to the high school for math (we're in elementary), and he can't do simple things. He memorized everything.

Wow. That guy must be a genious if he is in elementary.

Questions smarten the brain. Everybody has questions.

i love asking questions! sometimes people get annoyed about it

Einstein didn't even really "make up" that much new stuff, it was his ability to take what others had done and see the commonalities to generate a larger over arching theory. At least that is what his first 3 papers are basically about and the ones that made him famous. After that he collaborated on many things with other scientists.

For example, the concept of relativity was already well known with Newtonian Mechanics, the whole concept of an inertial reference frame is a relativistic idea, that was well known. The math for doing the Relativity Einstein talked about with Light and Gravity had already been developed by a mathematician named Lorentz. Einstein's great insight was to notice that he could use Lorentz transforms to explain the physical situations with how light and time interact with each other!

Adam wrote: "Einstein didn't even really "make up" that much new stuff, it was his ability to take what others had done and see the commonalities to generate a larger over arching theory. At least that is what..."

This is the same with many famous interlectuals, especially mathematicians. Not many make up theories and concepts from scratch.