this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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[–] bouh@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Einstein didn't excel in maths. He was a physicist. He knew maths to do physics, but he wasn't mathematician. He also had his calculus checked by someone else, because that's what any reasonable researcher does. And when you work with people like Dirac, Shrodinger, Heisenberg or Feinman, you really feel like you're bad at maths. You'd probably feel like an idiot too if you didn't already have a Nobel prize.

[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IIRC, it was Schwartzchild (sorry butchered spelling) that solved equations about black holes, Einstein maybe wasn't able to?

[–] bouh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I doubt it was a question of ability. It's more a matter of working on a problem for this. Einstein worked more on quantum physics after he made the relativity theory on which black holes are based.

But the matter is that physics is not done by one person, even at this time. The relativity for example is based on Minkovsky space iirc and refine ideas from Poincaré and a few others. Some guys do the maths and some others exchange ideas, and experience proves who is right or wrong.

Einstein was definitely a genius, but not for maths. He understood physics, and he understood what the equations meant for physics. I heard Dirac was a true math genius. He invented a new way to calculate quantum physics (the bra-ket thing I don't remember much), among other things.