MIT Compass
MIT Compass
What is genius?
For a transcript of this episode, click here (https://sites.mit.edu/compass/files/2025/06/Genius-Podcast-Transcript.pdf).
This episode explores the question ”What makes a genius and why does it matter?” with insights from MIT professors of music, math, physics, and history of science.
Featuring: Emily Richmond Pollock, Professor of Music (host); Larry Guth, Professor of Mathematics; and, David Kaiser, Professor of Physics and History of Science (STS).
This podcast was created as part of the MIT Compass Initiative, 21.01: “Love, Death, and Taxes.” For more information about Compass check out compass.mit.edu.
This podcast was recorded at the MIT AV Studios, and produced by Adina Karp.
Welcome to "MIT Compass: Thinking and Talking about Being Human," a show about exploring fundamental questions:
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:What do we value and why?
Intro Speaker 3:What do we know, and how do we know it?
Professor Alex Byrne:What do we owe to each other?
Intro Speaker 2:Hosted by MIT professors from across the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, each episode takes on the moral and ethical questions of the human experience.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:This week, we'll get into the question of what makes a genius and why does it matter? I'm your host today, Emily Richmond Pollock, I'm a professor in the Music and Theater Arts section at MIT, and I study the history of opera. With me is Professor Dave Kaiser. Dave:
Professor Dave Kaiser:Hi, my name is Dave Kaiser. I teach the history of science in MIT's program in Science, Technology and Society, that's within our School of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences. And I'm also a professor of Physics in the Physics department.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Thanks, Dave. And we also have Professor Larry Guth!
Professor Larry Guth:Hi! I'm Larry. I'm a professor in the math department, and I really like studying math, and I really like teaching math and talking about math with lots of different people.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Thank you so much. Thanks both of you for being here. This is gonna be really fun. So going into this, I'm just thinking, on a personal level, when I use the word genius, like I did at the top of the show, and right now, what is your immediate reaction to that word?
Professor Larry Guth:It's a little loaded. It's every part I get. I get like, my heart beats a little faster and part of me is excited, part of me is anxious.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, what about you, Dave?
Professor Dave Kaiser:Yeah, I think that's the sort of physiological reaction that Larry captures it really well. I think it's a, it's a helpful term, but often a loaded term, so it maybe gets my guard up. I want to learn more. I want to hear more, but I also want to, I get, want to get a little, a little critical, not to tear down, but like, my critical thinking or say, what went into that? Into that genius to whom for why? And that's not to say that the term has no use, but it makes it starts me wondering about who gets to say, what are the criteria, and according to whose judgment are we are going to use that label now.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, do you remember anything about how you used to think about genius? Like, maybe when you were the student's age or earlier in your life?
Professor Dave Kaiser:I have some memories. I mean, when I mean, when I was actually in high school, I was devouring popular science books (I still do), and they were often pretty uncritical. They were really kind of heroic stories about kind of Titans on the mountaintop. And it was thrilling to me, but also kind of distancing, you know, little old me could never imagine, you know, such such exalted figures. And it was actually just jumping ahead a little bit when I got my into started college, and someone who became an extremely dear, very important mentor to me, like the first week, said to me, you know, there's actually this thing called the history of science, which I didn't know. And he says, actually much more interesting than just stories of kind of, you know, out of context, lonely geniuses thinking great thoughts. And so it was actually a physics professor, Joe Harris, who nudged me toward a field that I dearly love and I've been
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:And sort of against the idea that the only thing that matters is these great men figures.
Professor Dave Kaiser:That they--were first of all, they were people. They had foibles and flaws and rivals and great talents as well. And they were never working alone. It was never a tale of isolated individuals, even when, when it seems most like in the received story. So it was really a, in this case, a very learned, widely read physicist who said, go, go read more history kid, which I was glad he did.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah. I love that.
Professor Dave Kaiser:Yeah.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:What about you, Larry? What do you remember if you think back to when you first started thinking about genius?
Professor Larry Guth:I had a book when I was in middle school that was called "Men of Mathematics," which sort of about geniuses of the past who did interesting things in math. And on the one hand, you look back at it, it is kind of, it was kind of charged a little bit like every so often he says that, you know, here's a test to test whether you are a super genius. You could try to figure out this thing, but on the other
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:When we think about each discipline that we're coming from--so I study music history, and so I thought a lot about how genius works for Beethoven, who's kind of this big looming figure who changed everything that he received, and nothing was ever the same. I'm wondering, for your different fields, how that kind of works. So maybe starting with math, since Larry was just getting some momentum going, how does, how does genius shape how we think about math, or how is genius used in in that field? hand, the book does sometimes do a very nice job of describing like, this is how people used to think about this thing, and this is how this person thought about it differently, and how that was interesting and exciting. And so mixed in with that, I learned some things where I felt like, "wow!"
Professor Larry Guth:Yeah. I mean, there are definitely figures, this kind of canon of genius mathematicians that I think is similar to music, Gauss and Newton. And if, you know, if you, if you walk around the big buildings at MIT and you read the names that are written, so, yeah, so there are all of these people. And yeah. I mean, you can kind of read it as a story of of different geniuses contributing big ideas and changing the direction of thought.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:I guess the piece that you didn't maybe cover yet is what counts as genius mathematics, right? So there's the genius mathematicians which you were just speaking about. And we think about, you know, these figures like Beethoven, or there's geniuses in different fields. Is there a such thing as a piece of mathematics that's like genius, or, you know, or super, super great, or whatever it is that that is the criteria for that would sort of transfer and make the person that made it a genius?
Professor Larry Guth:Right, right, right. You know, for good or bad, we have a kind of more precise thing that we can do than many other disciplines, because mathematicians will come up with problems that they can't solve. So one way that somebody kind of proves that they're a great mathematician is they can solve the problems that the previous generation put a lot of value on and couldn't figure out. And that often, but not always, involves really cool, new ideas. The other thing that stands out to me is is making a connection or a new point of view that hadn't been done before.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:And another marker is how you felt when you finally got it, right. Or there's that sense of like, if you can vibe with genius, it feels good. There's something that feels good about that, whether it's about the way you see yourself or just about the beauty of the thing itself. So, Dave, you're in two fields. You're in both STS and in physics. But so in physics and in STS, how do you think about genius?
Professor Dave Kaiser:Yeah, one thing that I think you mentioned, Larry, was one, one way we can recognize a mathematical genius is they can come in and solve a problem that the previous generation had recognized as interesting. The previous generation had had identified and invested some value in but had failed to solve, right? And that really resonated with me. That's a lot of what I think about. But both as an historian and in physics too, is what a lot of what gets me excited on the research is to ask, How does certain questions, let alone answers, come to be broadly shared? So how have communities of often, you know, people trained in very esoteric, abstract things, so a real kind of intentional training, not just people who kind of happened on this on their own.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:we thought was going to happen, and Nonetheless, how does a generation or cohort come to ask then someone comes up with something that's really questions in recognizably similar ways, with respect to which we could then see a real outlier, a real creative leap or something? It's not just doing the same as what most people do. And so it's not that I've flipped and been ignoring genius, per se, but I've just been really taken by the work that goes into formal training, like in universities in the modern period, in more informal phases of scientific training, like a postdoctoral phase, after a person's earned a PhD, finished taking classes, there's still a kind of formal training phase. It's just not quite the same as kind of, you know, coursework and problem sets, but nonetheless, we invest an enormous amount of effort in trying to get individuals and thereby, kind of generational cohorts, to ask questions in broadly recognizably similar ways, and that includes things like judgments. This is a valuable question. This is on the fringe or marginal. And then it's fun to put my historians cap on to see how the boundary of what counts as relevant or not, of course, doesn't stand still. And so some things that we're seeing that we deem to be enormously consequential questions, at least in physics, not so long ago, they don't actually solved, they get they get deemed sort of irrelevant. And that might be different. I'm not sure. The same thing happens in the same way with mathematics. We maybe can chat about that. So anyway, I've been really curious about the making of large groups who can recognize shared questions, because that doesn't just happen on its own either, and that doesn't make everyone who pursues a field a kind of robot blindly following some Pat rules. Of course not. There's lots of room for individual creativity, eccentricity, a leap here, a blind spot there. But I still, I'm really struck by this kind of shared, almost like kind of substrate of similarity, with respect to which, either today among colleagues I deeply cherish, or looking back in time, we can see, you know, moments where people did, did depart from a recognizable routine. surprising. So surprise seems important too.
Professor Dave Kaiser:Yeah.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:So you also were just talking about how important groups are versus the individual, and this had come up earlier as well, sort of the idea that the genius is an individual contributor. Wondering if we can accumulate a few more of the sort of tropes of genius, and they could be field specific. I think in some cases, they pertain to all three areas. But what are some other ones that you've noticed being particularly sticky?
Professor Dave Kaiser:Well, one that I don't think is helpful but doesn't seem to go away, is the so called mad genius--
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Oh, yeah.
Professor Dave Kaiser:--with something like mental illness and intellectual prowess, which I don't think has been borne up by careful historical scholarship, at least in history of science. But we also can't seem to shake it. We, more broadly. That's one,
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah. What about for you, Larry?
Professor Larry Guth:Yeah, another one that I think is kind of problematic is associating between genius and prodigy and and related thing, genius and something to whom everything comes easily.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, good. So, I mean, it maybe seems obvious, but can you spell out what the consequences might be of assuming that geniuses have to show promise early or get things really quickly?
Professor Larry Guth:Yeah, I mean, it, for students learning, I mean, most students go through a phase of struggle, and then they think, well, this means I'm not a genius and I can't, I'm not going to do anything of substance,
Professor Dave Kaiser:And I never will--
Professor Larry Guth:And I never will.
Professor Dave Kaiser:Because it hasn't happened yet, therefore, right, that's, yeah.
Professor Larry Guth:Right, right. And I think it's true both for you know, students who come in to college, say, with a little bit less background where, of course, they're not going to jump to being at the very top of the class or whatever, but even for students who come in with quite a quite a bit of background, I mean, at some point, everybody is going to start to struggle.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, so it has something to do with how we assume good work gets made, and that it shouldn't cost too much, or maybe it'll cost you your mental health, but it shouldn't be too hard to think about, or something, you should just get it. And that's not necessarily how inspiration really works.
Professor Dave Kaiser:I think that's right. It kind of lets the rest of us off the hook, as if we--why bother working hard and trying to you know, that's not a great message either, I Yeah. I mean, one, so one shortcoming, I don't think.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, interesting. So another one that I was talking about with Beethoven has to do with some idea of universality, that that the work will stand the test of time, that the result is a classic or even if someone builds upon it, it's sort of singular, has that status. And it occurs to me that in other fields that might be, they might be less classicizing than classical music is. Classical music, as the name implies, is very good at classicizing So, I mean, we talked about the names on the buildings. So there--and these books for general readers that kind of enshrine a canon. But when you actually think about research, does research really work that way, or is there a more complicated way to think about it? think, is this overwhelming emphasis on the individual, the Lonesome genius, the genius who's acting somehow alone. And again, it obviously varies across fields. It certainly varies across time. But that really underplays not just the kind of really, I think, positive, productive role of broadly shared social and pedagogical experiences, but also undercuts the fact that most research today in most fields is done in collaborations: 2, 3, 7, 1000 people. We have colleagues here who've shared the Nobel Prize for having led teams of 1000 researchers, and they're, to their credit, the first to say it's not them. It's this amazing, complicated team effort, and even with much more small sized groups. And I think when we bring, when we start thinking in that frame, then I think even a bunch of the individual names that we have that we walk past carved in our beautiful buildings on campus, you know, a little bit more digging shows they weren't really acting entirely alone either. That's that's an extreme example where we attribute lots and lots of individual kind of, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, people whose work I've studied as an historian, that even the ones who were not overwhelmingly social, per se, well, nonetheless, they weren't alone, and they were really dependent upon a kind of back and forth with a variety of people, including texts as well as individual kind of dialogue partners.
Professor Larry Guth:Math does a lot of classicizing things, and what we have in undergraduate education is a lot like reading the classics. We don't quite read them in the original but the sort of tradition is that each generation learns them and kind of makes them their own and passes them to the next generation. And I think there are some good things about that. One opposite of classicizing would be to only read things that were done in the last 10 or 20 years, and I think that there is a lot of value in having this long tradition.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:So I know that we're all sort of skeptical of the idea of genius, and that's very useful. Is there anything that we think is helpful about the term genius? Anything that we think it actually does give us insight into or is positive about it?
Professor Dave Kaiser:I'm going to speak freely and personally. I feel unbelievably lucky, because I feel like I'm genuinely surrounded by, if not geniuses, people who are doing things that I deeply admire and couldn't, don't feel like I could do on my own. And so instead of being really sad all the time because I'm not like them, I was like, what a playground, what an amazing opportunity. It's like, I'm a really, truly terrible tennis player. I play better tennis when I'm playing against a more skilled tennis player. I'm really bad. But the point is, I feel like I get that boost from being around people like the people in this room right now, frankly. And so I think, I think that's something that I genuinely, personally, kind of really cherish without having to slip into the kind of unreachable cast them in a marble statue. They're not like us. Just saying, there are gradations in what all kinds of people can do. There's not only one measure of merit, and along some things I find cool, that person just runs circles on me, and that's good, like, that's to be damning. We could celebrate that exciting for me, as opposed to, there's only one way I could, I could measure my own worth and I'm found unworthy. So instead to say we look at all these playmates, I get to admire the virtuosity that's not such a different word than genius, maybe, and learn from it and benefit and try to contribute, even if it's in a limited way. too.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah.
Professor Larry Guth:It's a little ironic to put the names on the building, because when you put the names on the building, they look all the same. It's as though these people are in a category of people who are all similar to each other. But I don't think they're so there might be some, I don't know. I raise the question whether they're similar to each other. I think the thing that is at least some of the time, the thing that's exciting is that they're each quite different from everybody else there.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah. And so if you can appreciate how their work came about and even think about the social context that allowed for it, maybe that actually raises your esteem of them in some way. It doesn't have to be about tearing them down by insisting that they had help or that there was a context around them that enabled it. This leads me to the next point that I wanted to raise, which is sort of the structural piece around when we insist that genius is the model of achievement in a particular field, how that might result in either exclusion, because people don't see themselves in that field and choose not to pursue it, or in more insidious ways, where they're actually excluded by the people who are in power. So I don't know if there are specific historical examples for that, or from your personal experience, but I we should talk about that a little bit.
Professor Dave Kaiser:that history of science, historians of science and technology, and sociologists and philosophers have been much more attuned to in last two, three generations, its not brand new to us now, but it's not how the field had started, is really trying to understand who whose work wasn't accredited in their own day, whose work was maybe anomalously slow to get credit, even after they were no longer those people were no longer around to enjoy, to receive it. And that goes back to the kind of shared social circumstances of what's the what's the community that is establishing the measure by which things will be recognized at all, let alone, you know, shown special recognition, like being called genius and so. So these days, of course, no, no shortage. I mean, just one quick one. Off the top of my head, it's on many people's minds these days is a very gifted astronomer only recently passed away, named Vera Rubin. And Vera Rubin did many, many extraordinary things in her lifetime. Had an extremely difficult time getting the kinds of positions that her male colleagues were routinely getting at those steps away between the 1940s into the 1960s and beyond, for example. And yet we now, you know, in in hindsight, realize that she was not alone in this, but playing an outsized role in helping us recognize that we have been missing most of what fills the universe for most of human history. That's pretty big. Yeah, I don't know if that's genius, but that's pretty amazing to set in motion. You know, a whole range of questions that are occupying literally 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s, of researchers every day around the world. Again, that's not say that Vera Rubin was the Lonesome genius who put that forward. That's--scholarship, historical sculpture has clarified that's not quite right, either. But there was an enormous gap between her own kind of professional advancement in her own lifetime, and even after she had passed away, in recognizing this was an unusually generative set of contributions that she and colleagues had put forward doggedly, often on the margins. And unfortunately, that's not the unique example. We have many, many examples that fill even just, say, within the history of physics. And of course, you expand beyond that and find all kinds of examples elsewhere.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:So one thing we can do when we're trying to revise our understanding of how genius functions is to look for people that weren't recognized as geniuses, but nonetheless had a big contribution to make, and to give them the same historical attention and some credit, and to try to rectify that, even if it's not, by insisting that she should also be considered a genius. I mean, that's--we deal with that in classical music also.
Professor Dave Kaiser:I bet. And I think one is to say, sort of give them their due. Another is to say, use that as a teachable moment for all of us. Say, "Well, why were they not treated that same way in their lifetime, or even soon after they had passed away, the way that the names that we did carve on our buildings, you know, had been treated?" And that's not only to wag fingers and say, good person, bad person. Say, what do we learn about our own as you said, systematic or institutional patterns, because we're we make those patterns, right? So maybe there's some we'd like to revisit. Maybe there's some, maybe that gives us an extra impetus, opens our eyes a bit broader. So we don't have to keep perpetuating those kinds of patterns if once we see it has been a pattern.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:So we definitely have the expertise from history with Dave here, and I'm wondering if Larry, if you're willing to talk a little bit of what you've noticed mentoring students in the present, whether they're undergraduates or PhD students, how much the concept of genius affects how they think of themselves ,how that's changed, maybe even since you've been teaching, how you're trying to change it, any of those things.
Professor Larry Guth:Something that comes up a lot for students and mathematicians of all levels, is this feeling of like,"Am I smart enough? Am I good enough at math? Am I going to be able to do something worthwhile?" And to get spend a while getting to know a student before we're comfortable enough that we both admit this, and then everybody feels much better, or at least a little better.
Professor Dave Kaiser:What about the young people who are going to self select out before we even before they we even have a chance to have that conversation, before Larry and his and his mentees can get comfortable, or myself with my group. I mean, so what are the ones who've chosen not even to enter that path?
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, it also seems pretty critical for if we do want to diversify these fields and make sure that everybody feels like they can contribute to them, that we have if we don't eliminate the story of genius as one path, that there should be other paths to, or that, you know, we need to see other kinds of templates of how people can succeed and contribute. So why is this idea so sticky? Why does it keep sticking around? I mean, I love that you brought up the mad genius because I'm thinking about all the mad scientists in cartoons and then. I mean, geniuses are sometimes the bad guys in in media and storytelling, but or they're either the best guys or the worst guys, I guess. But why do we why do we still reach for this concept as a culture, even if we know better, the three of us in this room? What do you think, Larry?
Professor Larry Guth:Well, I mean, I think when people get interested in math and probably other fields, I mean, there are some kind of exciting stories of something exciting that happened in math, and at least the way we're used to telling those stories is to have some exciting people who had some exciting different and new ideas in math. And even though it's complicated, there's probably there's some truth to that. And so I would say the current culture in math is that we try not to use the word genius very much.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, good.
Professor Larry Guth:But this change of not saying the word has not necessarily done a huge amount to change how we all think, and everybody can sort of fill in the word that nobody is saying. It might be just as charged as before in a different way because nobody is saying it.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah, one way to frame what you were saying in the first half of what you were just saying. One way to reframe it is to say awe is real, right? And the awe that you feel when you are surprised by something or something's really creative, if you know what its implications are, that feeling affectively and what it does to us, if we're invested in that part of the of knowledge is true, like there that's a real feeling and a cool feeling, and wanting to know more about the people that made it possible and to honor them, is that seems very human to me, and that's really cool.
Professor Dave Kaiser:I mean, this comes up in very, sometimes very not helpful discussions every October, at least in my little world, I have a very parochial world, which is when the Nobel Prizes are announced.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Oh, god, thank you. Yes. I really wanted to talk about prizes. I was going to a little while ago. Please talk about prizes.
Professor Dave Kaiser:Well, just, just to say that you know, you know, they're still given in physics and chemistry and essentially biology, sort of medicine and physiology, to a total of three recipients, never four, never posthumously, and increasingly, certainly on the physics side, probably in chemistry, but certainly the physics chemistry, but certainly the physics side, these folks are often representing, you know, either an immediate collaboration of many dozens to 1000, or the effective collaboration of many people. And so every year there's this basically predictable on schedule, the op eds will appear in the sort of science related media, usually making the same good point, but over and over again, which is, why are we stuck with this now, more than one, almost 120 plus year old convention that wasn't even really that true, you know, in the 1890s when it was set up, and certainly has become less and less true over time. So I think there's maybe we could carve out a positive role for the for these types of prizes. But I do think it comes maybe, like the term genius itself comes with, with some daggers, with some baggage. It's not, not all great, the way it's set up.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:I mean, there's, there's a set of grants called the genius grants.
Professor Dave Kaiser:The MacArthur! Those are given to only one person, that's not even three. That's right.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Right, so you have to be singular to get it. And there are, there are big prizes in math too.
Professor Larry Guth:There are, yes. I was thinking a bit about another field, which I care about a lot, which has a quite different setup, quite different, like genius setup, than math, which is teaching. So teaching develops over time. People practice it a lot, and they get ideas from other teachers. And, but we don't hear so much. There are some rock star teachers, but we don't hear so much about teaching geniuses. And if you go to a teaching course, I don't think you tend to hear that like before teacher X, like everybody was doing it this way, and then there was teacher x, and now we understand there's much more of a feeling that there's a craft, and everybody is working on this craft, and everybody's listening to each other, and ideas kind of travel through this group, and--
Professor Dave Kaiser:With creative variations, right? We're going to improvise a bit here and borrow from there, right?
Professor Larry Guth:Yes, yes. And, you know, that could fit math.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:Yeah. Also some more space for mistakes, I think is helpful, right? So if you think about, if you assume that geniuses are never wrong, then what's the, what's the place of mistakes or wrong turns or, you know...
Professor Dave Kaiser:Yeah, I mean, that's one where maybe it's different than either maybe math or certainly music. You know, in physics, I say this every semester, if not every class session, you know, name your favorite. You know, off scale, lauded physicists. They were wrong more often than they were right, and that's not to fault them, right? Thank goodness. It means they were trying stuff out like we're all wrong more often we're right. They had a few things that seemed to have stood the test of time, you said earlier, more than others. But Richard Feynman, wrong. Albert Einstein, totally bonkers wrong on, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of things, and then also contributions that we, you know, carve into our buildings and benefit from, really use to this day. So, so there doesn't have to be this kind of unbroken hit, even, even the ones who are often called geniuses in this field. We just have to know they were wrong, just all the time and that. And that's good. That means they were trying stuff. They were trying stuff out, and they themselves would say, oh, that didn't work. All right. What if we try this? You know, that's a good thing.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:So what is one thing you'd want the MIT students to take away from this conversation?
Professor Larry Guth:I feel like in each generation, or for each person, there's they're in a different situation, and if the way that they will do really good work, it probably will build on like learning and thinking a lot about the previous generation, but it probably will be a little different from what the previous generation did.
Professor Dave Kaiser:Yeah, I agree, and I guess I would go back to what I was saying a moment ago, like, if we're not going to try stuff out and make mistakes, sometimes really ridiculous mistakes, then what are the odds we're going to try something that happens to pan out as well. And so we're not the only ones who ever made mistakes. Everyone around us has probably yesterday or this morning, not just the long distance past and and again, as I was just saying, if we can think of making of trying stuff out in a group with with friends and colleagues, students and mentors, problem set partners, whatever the scale might be, then the odds of something cool coming out of it probably go up. So, so Why hold it? Why hold back? Instead, try this out and then this kind of creative again, the kind of improvisation like I was just saying about borrowing techniques from talented teachers. These things otherwise, the odds for them to make it through and be anything worth keeping are probably lower, unless we're going to channel what we each might be able to bring and nudge and try something out together.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:So we're going to wrap up by asking what artwork, whether that's a book or a piece of music or visual art, was your favorite when you were in college. So Larry, do you want to go first?
Professor Larry Guth:Yes, a book that meant a lot to me in college was Chekhov's plays. I read them a lot, and I think what resonated with me is they had these characters who had big dreams, and their dreams were, were always frustrated, and they were, they were sad and frustrated, and also they had these very human relationships with other characters, which didn't help them with their big dreams, but they were maybe really more real and important than the dreams that they had. That could also be a thing about being a genius. You know, I want to be a genius. This is my big dream. I want to do--
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:world changing work
Professor Larry Guth:Yeah, and then over, over time, something a little more organic and something a little bit more personal might be a good direction.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:What about for you, Dave?
Professor Dave Kaiser:is a book that was recommended to me by the same mentor I mentioned earlier in our discussion, Joe Harris, who was my first kind of physics mentor as an undergraduate. And it's a popular book. It's not--it was written by a practicing, very gifted physicist, but it really was trying to explain, you know, complicated esoteric things for non specialist is very I think there's either zero or very few equations. And what really stuck with me was this was a kind of smorgasbord. It was like a preview of the delights that that were promised to me if I just stuck with it, things that I still get, you know, a chill, the fact that I get to think about these things with smart students and colleagues all the time. Just the stubborn strangeness, strangenesses of quantum theory, Schroedinger's cat, quantum entanglement, of gravitation, of black holes and the Big Bang. And it was all laid out for me, frankly, in a kind of inviting way. I mean, I think Pagels was unusually gifted at making strange or counterintuitive things seem exciting, but not off putting, at least not to me. And he also cloaked it in a kind of historical framing. So it was, I was trying to take seriously. These were people who were struggling and arguing and fighting and calling each other names and rivals and arguing over the end of the night and also sometimes helping each other. So it was, it was a bit of a not, I don't mean to make sound like a soap opera, but it was a kind of human adventure that spanned across the generations And to me, that beckoned as an invitation, like, you know what? Maybe, maybe the job's not done, and maybe there is a handoff to be had. And that really stuck with me. And I just remember just devouring this book like, I think Joe knew, with 100% accuracy that I would.
Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:That's awesome! I love that. I actually, I'm an opera historian now, but I'd never been to an opera before I was in college, and I didn't really know whether I liked opera or not, but in the sophomore tutorial that I took, where it was basically music history over two semesters, we watched the opera "Lucia di Lammermoor" by Donizetti. And what's cool about that opera, the story's kind of silly and in some ways very serious, but there's a moment where Lucia sings a lot of notes that don't have words to them. She, she kind of loses her mind, and she sings a huge number of notes without any words. And that is kind of the that's the moment where opera is a different kind of storytelling than other kinds of storytelling, because somebody in the space of the opera is using music to tell you who they are and what they're thinking about, and not words to do it, even though the rest of the opera has words. Donizetti, incidentally, not usually thought of as a genius because he wrote too many operas and they were too conventional. But I would, I would put to you that that that scene of "Lucia di Lammermoor" is still pretty genius. Thank you so much Larry and Dave for being here and talking with me about genius today.
Professor Larry Guth:Thank you. It was really nice to be here.
Professor Dave Kaiser:Great pleasure.
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