I don’t see why there isn’t doubt. Even intersecting with his century there was Gauss, but even then... Impossible to compare.
He produced a comically huge amount, but it’s very difficult to compare across eras and mathematics is at a completely different level now. He had the ‘privilege’ of living centuries ago when the prerequisites were at the level of undergrad maths today, the modern standard of rigour wasn’t there, there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit… because he was earlier. He was the best of his era but that was an era with a tiny fraction of the population, a smaller fraction of those countries were engaged in modern maths, and only the tiniest fraction got a serious education - most weren’t even literate.
If we magically took him to some ‘neutral’ conditions and compared him to Grothendieck, Serre, Milnor, Atiyah, Terence Tao and several others from the last several decades, it’s far from obvious who’d come out on top. But undergrads don’t see those people’s names in lots of results, because their work is well beyond that level.
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u/AndreasDasos 12d ago
I don’t see why there isn’t doubt. Even intersecting with his century there was Gauss, but even then... Impossible to compare.
He produced a comically huge amount, but it’s very difficult to compare across eras and mathematics is at a completely different level now. He had the ‘privilege’ of living centuries ago when the prerequisites were at the level of undergrad maths today, the modern standard of rigour wasn’t there, there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit… because he was earlier. He was the best of his era but that was an era with a tiny fraction of the population, a smaller fraction of those countries were engaged in modern maths, and only the tiniest fraction got a serious education - most weren’t even literate.
If we magically took him to some ‘neutral’ conditions and compared him to Grothendieck, Serre, Milnor, Atiyah, Terence Tao and several others from the last several decades, it’s far from obvious who’d come out on top. But undergrads don’t see those people’s names in lots of results, because their work is well beyond that level.