Mathematics is an ancient discipline. For as long as we can reliably reach into the past, we find its development intimately connected with the devel… - Mark Kac

I then reached for a time honored tactic used by mathematicians: if you can't solve the real problem, change it into one you can solve.

In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.’’ An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “‘ordinary genius’’; so much so that one may gain the erroneous impression that he is not a genius at all. But it was Feynman, only slightly older than Dyson, who captured the young man’s imagination. To be a physicist must have meant to him to be like Feynman and this, alas, was impossible. And so Dyson fell back on the source of strength he always had in reserve: the mastery of mathematical technique.

In the summer of 1930 my academic future, however, was not uppermost in my mind. I had been stricken by an acute attack of a disease which at regular intervals afflicts all mathematicians and, for that matter, all scientists: I became obsessed by a problem.