So I'm not such a great believer in talent. Maybe I'd rather use the word ... because... I find that the people talk too much about the genius, and..… - Tadashi Tokieda

The study of languages, some... call it linguistics, but the nuance is quite different. Linguistics, since especially Chomsky and that school, became very... analytical and almost mathematical, and so I'm absolutely not interested in or... an analytical study of languages. ...I'm a mathematician, and if I wanted to that... I'll just do... straight mathematics... [I]nstead, philology in the glory days of the 19th century meant primarily the reconstruction of the Indo-European family. So people knew lots and lots of languages, and their peculiarities, and their accidentals and evolution in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit... [I]t was practiced outside the European family, for notably the Semitic family, especially languages that have a lot of written records that go way back, and you can do science. So that's what philology means and that's what they used to do, but I do emphasize that I'm... absolutely not interested in mathematical aspects of linguistics. I'm interested in the languages themselves.

In science we... tend to be interested in things that have been already labeled "interesting." ...[W]e ...think science happens in institutionalized contexts, and that the latest fashions and the "cutting edge" ...is where science occurs... [P]eople who get interested in science often read... books that tell you about the cutting edge... and they get excited, but it's not that they have had an intimate contact with science and got excited. It's rather that sociologically they have been told to be excited about something that's supposed to be exciting. ...They haven't had any exposure to "theory X" but they... are told hero stories... romantic stories... But those... "sciences in flower"... are already blossoming. ...[T]hey have lots and lots of intricate structures up there and [are] connected to lots and lots of things. But at the same time, as with plants, we should look at "sciences in sprout." ...We have the impression that when we stop doing science and go on holiday, or close up our offices and shut down the laboratories for the weekend, science stops happening. And when you close the textbooks and the professor says, "OK, end of class!" you can forget about science... and it stops happening. But that's not true. There's something that keeps practicing science 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, nonstop everywhere in the world, everywhere in the universe, and that's called Nature! If you take... even this blob of air in front of me... there are so many beautiful and intricate and unbelievably complicated, complex s that are dancing together and trying to satisfy one another, and succeeding and satisfying this huge... network of patterns. That is science! It's amazing, and conversely, there is nothing easier to discover than science. ...Everywhere I look, there must be science, because we live in this universe. We cannot even escape living in this universe. We need... imagination and a little bit of patience because you often fail, but especially... we need to look, imagine and maybe a willingness to be trained in acquiring better vision, which is called scientific education. ...It's wonderful that people get interested in science because they're supposed to be interested in science and read... and so on, but that they also try in daily life, phenomena around them, however modest. It would be nice if they started noticing sciences in sprout.

[T]he one lesson that I drew from coming in from... lots and lots of detours. ...[T]he other side of the coin. ...I started doing mathematics seriously quite late ...That had interesting consequences. ...Most people in mathematics came into mathematics early ...typically in your teens ...[T]he phenomenon of exists ...only in music and mathematics. ...[C]hild prodegies exist primarily as performers, and the mathematical equivalent is problem solvers, rather than theory builders, and the music equivalent would be s. It's true that Mozart was a child prodigy in composition, but on the whole... performers and problem solvers are the dominant types of child prodigies... [T]his phenomenon only exists in music and mathematics, and correspondingly, they come in quite early... Innate or not... it involves a lot of ... Well, maybe there is such a thing as talent... but one necessary condition for a child prodigy... is... the... that could bear with long long long hours of enormous amounts of training, and sometimes it becomes an obsession. ...I'm aware that child prodigies exist in chess and in ... and in go and so on, but that's... a small variation on mathematics... I don't know about innateness and... I'm not sure about... talent. ...[T]he human brain is a very complicated machine and it would be very surprising if there is no... innate difference between one brain and another... after all, there are innate differences between one body and another... I have seen lots and lots of mathematics students... who are very talented... by the standard judgement... But ultimately... on the whole, I am simplifying... it's really the effort, and how much you really like the subject that made a difference as to ultimate success.