Reminds me of the Einstein vs Edison story about Einstein not knowing the speed ...

Someone · on Sept 21, 2013

Another example of the same (or at least something similar) is Alexander Grothendieck. See http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf (start at the last paragraph of page 1)

By the way: that text is in the past tense, not because Grothendieck has died, but because he retired from mathematics in a quite abrupt way. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retireme...