"... he was forced to solve the riddles himself, rather than plucking the accepted solution from a textbook ..."
The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough. The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about effective optimization techniques.
When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.
The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough. The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about effective optimization techniques.
When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.