(I’m unique, therefore, statistically, I don’t exist)

It is not an either/or situation: Clearly hard work is necessary, and trying out different approaches is necessary. But you occasionally meet someone whose ability to attack from a variety of unexpected angles blows you away. This is not something that hard work, alone, can provide.

Aside from Feynman, I also knew a rather more obscure individual. I recall posing a question to him, concerning the existence and nature of a function f(x), that would satisfy f(f(x)) = exp(x). He immediately seized on this question and started thinking out loud; in 15 minutes he got further with it than I had in a day. The next day, I asked for a review of his first 15-minute presentation, which he covered in 5 minutes; and then proceeded to think out loud for another 15-minutes. The third day, I asked for a review of the first two days, which he covered in 5 minutes and then proceeded to go on for another 15 minutes. I gave up trying to follow him, at this point.

In this particular case, I knew that this individual actually had less mathematical background, at that time, than I did, and had never thought about the problem before. In fact, the steps that he took initially were not so different from what I was thinking about, but he took them much faster and kept going and going. He was clearly out-classing me on this topic.

In my interactions with Feynman, it was like that all the time; except that the range and variety of steps that he would consider were wilder. Actually, it wasn’t discouraging, it was liberating: It was as if he were giving “permission to play”.

I have met other great physicists, but not anyone who practically sparkled with ideas like that.

Thanks to a suggestion from a friend (who later became my wife), I turned to linguistics, then cognitive science, in which I’m now about a year away from a PhD (and there’ve been all kinds of crummy grades on the transcript along the way).

And, not that I want to contribute to the cult, but why is von Neumann not mentioned anywhere in the comments? He gets my vote as smartest man of the XXth century (he certainly made significant contributions to more fields than anyone else!).