> I think the time when one man could bring us a century forward like Newton or Einstein is gone.
I'm certain his contemporaries said the same about Pythagoras.
You're not wrong about how much more complex things have gotten, certainly.
But you don't know what you don't know. Another Ramanujan or von Neumann could be right around the corner.
Just look at all the wasted potential in our education system - it's impossible to quantify just how much effort is profoundly wasted.
This article points directly to that wastage. We've tolerated an academic system that's hated by just about everyone except publishers, in an era where publishing is as close to free as it could be.
There is not room to make education a million times more efficient and effective for one single person. A brain has extreme physical limits. Computers can do it because they can combine millions of computers to work together, limited only by asymptomatic constraints like the Amdahl's law.
“Although Pythagoras is most famous today for his alleged mathematical discoveries, classical historians dispute whether he himself ever actually made any significant contributions to the field.
[…]
The Pythagorean theorem was known and used by the Babylonians and Indians centuries before Pythagoras, but he may have been the first to introduce it to the Greeks. Some historians of mathematics have even suggested that he—or his students—may have constructed the first proof. Burkert rejects this suggestion as implausible, noting that Pythagoras was never credited with having proved any theorem in antiquity.”
What mathematical discoveries? You just quoted wikipedia saying that (1) he's most famous for his alleged mathematical discoveries, and (2) he is not alleged to have made any mathematical discoveries.
I'm certain his contemporaries said the same about Pythagoras.
You're not wrong about how much more complex things have gotten, certainly.
But you don't know what you don't know. Another Ramanujan or von Neumann could be right around the corner.
Just look at all the wasted potential in our education system - it's impossible to quantify just how much effort is profoundly wasted.
This article points directly to that wastage. We've tolerated an academic system that's hated by just about everyone except publishers, in an era where publishing is as close to free as it could be.