Vlad Tenev

I think that mathematics, hard mathematics isn't computational at all.

It's almost like art.

It's really about figuring out an insight, a non-obvious insight that unlocks a problem.

Yeah, and I think the reason that I like it is because

It's all about figuring things out.

And I think that insight, there's a lot of it that's kind of mechanical.

It's like once you have it, you just turn the crank and you get the proof or you get the answer.

Yeah, that special insight can be really, really magical.

And to me, it's just about figuring things out.

So the reason I actually got into mathematics, if you remember, it's because of physics.

When I was a kid, one of the first books that my dad sort of encouraged me to read was Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time.

And that book deals with kind of the big questions, right?

what happened before the Big Bang?

Why is the universe the way it is?

You have this constant that measures the flatness of the universe, right?

And if it's like,

basically like too high the universe is going to expand at an increasing rate and everything is just gonna just die out in this like expansionary death if it's too low the universe is gonna re-collapse again we would have never had galaxies and stars

And it turns out if we measure it, ours is exactly one.

It's like immeasurably close to one in this equilibrium between like death by expansion and death by contraction, which is crazy.

If it's a little bit off, we would have never existed, right?