Kip Thorne arrived at Caltech to study physics without having learned calculus.
Although he had been fascinated by astronomy from childhood, the pace of Caltech was unlike anything he had experienced. He was surrounded by exceptionally prepared students and began to feel that he thought and read more slowly than nearly everyone around him.
In his Nobel autobiography, Thorne admitted:
“I had had no calculus, I was a slow reader.”
For roughly eighteen months, he said that he “stumbled and struggled” through the mathematics and physics expected of a Caltech undergraduate.
Instead of concluding that he was not capable of becoming a physicist, Thorne changed the way he studied.
He created a separate notebook for every important course. In each one, he rewrote the central ideas in his own language, reconstructed the mathematical derivations for himself, and searched for a physical explanation behind every equation.
By the middle of his second undergraduate year, he had caught up. This method of rebuilding difficult subjects from first principles remained part of how he learned throughout his scientific career.
Thorne later became one of the world’s leading experts on black holes, curved spacetime and gravitational waves.
He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for decisive contributions to LIGO and the first direct observation of gravitational waves.
Juan Maldacena, Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics laureate, spoke about the importance of recognizing scientists who dedicate their lives to extremely challenging work. He added that science is interesting and worth pursuing and that it offers a fulfilling and exciting career.
@martinmbauer@nikitabier I'm sure some aliens out there discovered it this way first rather than from the sqrt -1. I like this even more because it is easily generalizable to quaternions.