All in all, at my venerable age of 37, I am satisfied to have a google scholar profile and I am very grateful to have enjoyed collaborating with many people much more gifted than me.
As years pass, I become more and more convinced that the only way I could achieve this was not mathematical talent but sheer laziness.
Some background on why I was good in math, but not really
I had almost no math education until the age of 18. I went to a humanistic school, learned Latin, Greek, Philosophy and the like. In my last year, I heard rumors about limits and exponential functions from my math teacher. I thought them esoteric mysteries reserved to University students. I decided, this was not interesting enough for me.
However, I was somewhat talented for numbers and I still can calculate very quickly possible figures, on the other side I have never had any intuitive grasp of geometry. I literally hate triangles and congruence criteria, not to mention 3D geometry, which should be prohibited by UNICEF as a perverse mean for teens torture.
So I went to University, and started studying mechanical engineering, just because of good job perspectives, if you want to know it. However, after hearing the introduction of natural numbers according to Peano, I decided to switch in the end. I just enjoyed that so much!
How to survive pages of estimates through laziness
Somehow I got a master degree in math. I was 25 as I finished my studies, I decided that I still could some fun time and did my PhD. Laziness is no good starting point to complete a PhD in maths, though. But it has some advantages. Whilst navigating the treacherous waters of choosing a cool topic for my thesis, I steered clear from everything what promised years of suffering because of excessive calculations. In contrast, after some attempts I settled to a reasonable subject where more or less nothing had be written, so that I could graze on green pastures and produce interesting theorems with limited effort. It was not a conscious effort in that time, but now, years later, I recognize the pattern very clearly.
I had a very good supervisor. He was back then PostDoc in my institute, and he had quite some talent for doing long calculations without errors. He tried to motivate me to learn this skill. Again, I was very bad at this, but had some insights for finding shortcuts and proving theorems with as little effort as possible. Laziness, again. This saved my academic life in similar situations over and over again. Another example: I was once included as an author in my most cited paper for the only reason that I revealed to a very good PhD student the secret of shortening calculations with the judicious use of Fourier transforms and matrix inversion.
Laziness in life
In the end, I think that laziness helped me in life too. We built a house with my wife some years ago. This is quite a complex endeavor, I can say you. It needs hundreds of decisions, and can become seriously exhausting. Somehow, we decided to settle for a "good enough" strategy. When faced with any decision or option we would always take the first one which was good enough. We talked to friends in the same situation. They were horrified that we planned, chosen and bought our new kitchen in well below 4 hours. When I was a PostDoc, I was struggling to start an academic career. I changed field after the PhD, so I probably would have needed some more stations before becoming settled. Judiciously, I just decided that I would give industry a chance, and I have never regretted this. Academia was just not my path. By the way, the PostDoc which supervised me during my PhD thesis is now a respected Professor. It was his path.
I admit, there are situations in which you have to push and go the extra mile. Can you ever be sure that this is the case now? Burnt energies do not come back for free and if you rush too soon you will not do the run.
And you? Have you already found yourself in situation when healthy laziness helped you succeed?
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