That’s false he wasn’t bad at math. It’s a (false) myth that’s perpetuated. Before he was years 15 old he’d mastered differential and integral calculus:
There is a myth, that Einstein was so bad at math that he failed math.
There is also a quip by mathematicians and physicists that he just wasn't that good at math. I heard this a few times in undergrad physics, and the proof was typically that while he had good insight, his field equations for GR, Einstein said were neigh impossible to solve, but Schwarzchild and a few others almost instantly had solutions. Einstein was really good at math with regards to normal people, but when you compare with great mathematicians and physicists (Gauss, Euler, Von Neumann, etc), he was probably on the lower end.
I remember when I was a kid, I'd heard various things about how Einstein failed school or was bad at mathematics or was just a simple patent office clerk etc etc...
Seems he was in fact super smart and educated at good schools / universities in the countries he lived in. As you'd expect from someone who revolutionised parts of science.
Tbh I was taught both in school at about the same age.
This doesn't prevent me from kicking the kubernetes can down the road instead of coming up with more general relativity. Maybe it's the lust that's insufficient.
The low hanging fruit on physics discoveries using current technology is also all taken.
The right person at the right place at the right time -- the time is maybe the biggest one. It's not just Einstein who revolutionized physics, his contemporaries did too
On General Relativity after having published ground breaking publications on Special Relativity and Brownian motion. David Hilbert is one of the greatest mathematicians in history - it is a bit unfair to detract from someone's abilities if they receive help from the one of the world's top practitioners.
He wasn't bad at math, but his wife was better at math than he was, and there is a lot of historical evidence suggesting they collaborated on his "miracle year" papers.
