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Mark Kantrowitz giỏi quá .

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(Quora) Have you ever had a student turn in a paper that was beyond your intellectual ability to understand?

Answered by Mark Kantrowitz:

My college had a writing requirement where you had to write a paper in your field.

I didn’t realize that they wanted a book report, so I wrote a real paper, with a new proof of a theorem in topology. (I was an undergraduate student taking graduate math classes.)

The writing office was unable to evaluate the paper and, for some reason, couldn’t ask the professor in my topology class to evaluate it.

It took them months to evaluate it. I checked in with them every few weeks, as normally it would take them just a week to evaluate a paper. Eventually, they sent it out to a professor at another university to evaluate it. The paper was dense with theorems and lemmas.

In the meantime, my professor had submitted it to a major math competition.

The day I learned that my paper had passed the writing requirement was the same day I learned that I had won the Courant Institute Prize for Mathematical Talent.