Three teenage years spent on the Riemann hypothesis

And I think also to add to that story, to add a few more characters into it. So there was one of our teachers, Dr. Maxwell, who I think was very formative for us in learning new types of math. ⁓ I'd go to him like every day after class and show him what I was learning. Luigi did too. And yeah, I discovered, Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare and ⁓ basically just every single day would do hours of math after school. For me, it was addictive because it was really just the truth and it was a way of understanding the universe. So a lot of my initial interest in that had to do with understanding physics. And I think at some point I realized in order to understand physics very well after having

Mm.

you know, gone on YouTube courses like Leonard Suskind's general relativity courses, I realized like, okay, this fundamentally is about, you know, having intuitions, but also being very well equipped in the mathematics to do it. And yeah, so I just said about that venture and about when I was about 13, I think Dr. Maxwell said that the hardest problem in the world was Riemann hypothesis. And I spent

Mm.

three years of my life trying to solve it. And it didn't work out, obviously, but it was still very cool because I got to learn various types of math, differential geometry, number theory. And at some point, I remember Luigi went away to college in New York and I was kind of stuck on my own on this island and sort of ran out of the MIT OpenCourseWare and the Khan Academy. I started emailing mathematicians around the world and eventually one day this really quite notable mathematician from Princeton replied to me in English class and I remember being so excited that this guy's taking an opportunity on this random kid from the Caribbean. And yeah, that was sort of the start of our journey on the small islands.

Hahaha

We ended up going to that math professor, I remember that quite clearly, like visiting him in his office, which was also pretty interesting experience.

this is so cool.

So that was actually, that might have been a different one. So that was the, one of the, I think, chairman of Harvard or something at the time. But yeah, that was slightly different.