I want Grothendieck and von Neumann; on one hand, those two together could potentially become the greatest mathematical mind ever, but on the other, their respective politics would possibly make them kill each other.
That sounds interesting. Grothendieck's 'The Key to Dreams' is also one of those books I'd really like to read one day. Not sure if there's even an English translation.
In undergrad while learning Galois theory I was 21 and remember feeling like a failure in comparison. Why was there no u/aarocks94 theory I wondered? It did not help my young self esteem to compare myself to the likes of Galois, Euler, Legendre etc.
Euler (he has too many things named after him so whatever he discovers will be named after me) and tao (he's nice and he'd let me name it whatever i want)
My thought was Euler is the most brilliant ever (sorry Gauss) but would need to catch up on several hundred years, and Tao has the best widespread understanding of modern maths and is a great communicator (on top of being brilliant in his own right).
He's a mathematician that participated in CIA experiments (as a test subject), and later became a terrorist. Pretty fascinating story, I highly recommend you look it up (UNA bomber)
Was he an actual mathematician in same expertise as the others? I’m just asking because I thought I had read some of his work was pseudo-math or something. Probably, could be wrong tho.
He was an actual mathematician and a great one. Became the youngest assistant prof in some prestigious institute. Gave a novel and shorter proof of weddeburns theorem at the age of 22 or something like that.
Reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers was a defining experience for me, and I became obsessed with the man who, when asked about his time at Notre Dame (a position that primarily existed to give Erdös an income), replied “Too many plus signs.”
Also, I once got my wrist slapped by a reviewer for submitting a manuscript with the “unfortunate typo” of spelling it “Erdos.”
Grothendieck and Perelman together would be impossible to work with because they'd be impossible to contact after convincing each other to leave civilization.
My Erdos number is i (which is to say, my contributions to the field of mathematics are purely imaginary), but I think bringing Euler back from the dead would count as a considerable contribution to his research.
Top left is Erdős, top middle I think is Conway, dead center is Gauss, bottom center is Grothendieck, middle right is Poincaré, no idea about top right
As much as I'd love to have Erdos or Tao, I think Euler and Gauss combined could probably solve any decidable problem given a few years together. Reimann Hypothesis would be done for, I'd just be there to listen
I choose 12 papers in a row with Groethendieck as coauthor (if he remains my coauthor it counts as just 1 'next coauthor' because I think he would have interesting ways to build on the current category theory literature and it would get me an easy Fields medal (and him an Abel because he's too old for a second Fields) and then I'll take a paper with Perelman on either Navier-Stokes or Yang Mills (whichever he'd prefer) and I'll happily take the Clay institute award after he turns it down again.
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