<<back to home How To Understand Things Published: July 1, 2020. Substack version I. The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved. I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since...
