Do you know any famous mathematician who had a normal life before becoming famous ?

Basically the Greeks.

Fermat was a lawyer who did math as a hobby.
Cayley was also a lawyer.
Witten was a journalist (his degree was in history iirc) before doing math and gaining a fields medal.
Kirkman (the combinatorist) started with math at his fourties.
Fourier was a high ranking officer on Napoleon's army, a famous egyptologist (his works are still reference) and governor of a province in France.
Grassmann (geometric algebra guy) was a highschool teacher with training in linguistics.
Paul Halmos did his undergrad in phylosophy and failed his master in phylosophy, causing him to change fields.
I think one of the Bernoulis was a medic.
Weirstrass was 49 when he got his degree

>Weirstrass was 49 when he got his degree

Reminds me of,

>In 1832, aged nearly forty, Green was admitted as an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.[5] He was particularly insecure about his lack of knowledge of Greek and Latin, which were prerequisites, but it turned out not to be as hard for him to learn these as he had envisaged, as the degree of expected mastery was not as high as he had expected. In the mathematics examinations, he won the first-year mathematical prize. He graduated with a BA in 1838 as a 4th Wrangler (the 4th highest scoring student in his graduating class, coming after James Joseph Sylvester who scored 2nd).[5]

(Because he grew up poor, but was a genius)

>It is unclear to historians exactly where Green obtained information on current developments in mathematics, as Nottingham had little in the way of intellectual resources. What is even more mysterious is that Green had used "the Mathematical Analysis," a form of calculus derived from Leibniz that was virtually unheard of, or even actively discouraged, in England at the time (due to Leibniz being a contemporary of Newton who had his own methods that were championed in England). This form of calculus, and the developments of mathematicians such as Laplace, Lacroix and Poisson were not taught even at Cambridge, let alone Nottingham, and yet Green had not only heard of these developments, but also improved upon them.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Green_(mathematician)

>sci neets and losers read this thread
>think theyre going to be geniuses in the future

Lawyers are smart though, its not surprising they did well in math.

Genius requires great talent, but to be really good just requires a little talent and loads of hard work. Most here would be happy with being college professor tier if they are passionate about maths.

The pseudo "intellectuals" who want to appear smart are pathetic though.

Almost of these guys started learning math late in their life, thus there wasn't any way to know how good they were before they became famous.

Isn't there an example of someone who received proper math education at the same age as any other math student, without being that good in class ?
Bonus points if the guy lived in the 1900's

Gothendieck said he had never been brilliant at school. There's a quote he said he could never see himself as someone who wins presitegous competitions. His childhood was tough, war years, growing without a father.
He became seriously interested in Mathematics only at the age of 17. Grothendieck was so swallowed by his own research that he neglected some subjects at his first college which resulted in failing his trigonometry-astronomy exam ( an OP-imagined 'math genius' wouldn't fail).

He is arguably the most influential mathematician on the 20th century

Manhz and Pietro Smusi probably fit the bill. You probably never heard of them because they never delved into pop-sci territory.

So something I dont see mentioned here is that school pre 1970s was a whole other level of dreadful than it is today. I do think school today is still not as conducive to learning as it should be. But most of the guys being brought up went to schools where they were literally treated like army recruits. Its no wonder they did better outside of school.

Todays schooling is for the most part a lot better.

me

>Newton was born as a poor farm boy
Newton was actually wealthy, relatively speaking anyway. But yes he wasn't exposed to math until university.

IIRC Voevodsky failed out of high school and failed out of college. He started writing a mathematician in Harvard and the mathematician was so impressed he admitted him as a grad student. Then Voevodsky almost failed his qual exams despite revolutionizing the field he almost failed in. He later went on to win the fields medal.

Details of the story may be off just reciting from memory but it’s the gist.

Genius also requires a shit-ton of hard work. Don’t play down how much effort real geniuses put into their study

Also IIRC once he got kicked out of school he just read and went through a ton of math books.

Grothiendieck also independently rediscovered the labesgue integral and a lot of measure theory as an undergrad.

I think Banach was self-taught.

Einstein was above-average, but not brilliant.

Heaveside was an autodidact in mathematics too

Consider that a lot of "child prodigy" stories, especially nowadays, are made up and exaggerated a posteriori.

Yeah this is something that people rarely mention. Even von Neumann worked really hard. When you're good at something and get recognition for it it tends to make working hard easier. Snowball effect

With the exception of Tao and Perelman there are no 'child prodigys' in recent memory that actually did/do anything important.

wiener

>a posteriori.
please look up what this means, because it makes no sense in the context you used.

Not that I expect much from an anime poster.

But Veeky Forums told me that hard work was for brainlets.

Hawking got a 2:1

wasn't gauss middle to working class?

gauss was a child prodigy

wasn't Einstein poor?