The 7 Levels of Mathematician

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Around 1776 when Carl Friedrich Gauss was a child, his teacher Johann George Büttner asked the class to add 1 + 2 + 3 all the way to 100 thinking it would keep them busy. Instead, Gauss almost immediately answered 5,050. What's crazy was he was right. But Gauss didn't literally add each number up in his head in a matter of seconds. He just noticed a clever pattern. If you pair numbers from opposite ends of the sum, each pair adds to 101. And because there are 50 pairs in total, the overall sum will be 101 * 50, which is 5,050. In this video, I'll be digging into the seven levels of mathematicians where level seven is the most epic mathematician story I could find. Level one, Pythagoras. Whenever a normie is asked to name mathematicians, they always jump to Pythagoras because of the popularity of Pythagoras' theorem, which was invented by Pythagoras, right? Well, actually no, because the Babylonians were already using this formula over 1,000 years before Pythagoras. Pythagoras also ran a secret school where discoveries made by his students were often credited to Pythagoras even though we don't really know whether it was him or his students.

[00:01:08]What's more is we don't have any physical writings of Pythagoras himself.

[00:01:13]Many stories and discoveries were made up by writers centuries later. And he wasn't like most mathematicians because instead of sharing his discoveries with the world, he decided to keep it secret within his own secret school as if we all wouldn't eventually find out anyway.

[00:01:27]Level two, Kurt Gödel. In 1931 when Kurt Gödel was only 25 years old, he published the incompleteness theorem. In plain English, it said that any powerful enough system of mathematics will always contain true statements that cannot be proven inside that system. Think about that for a second. That implies that there are mathematical statements which are true, but there are no ways that we could ever possibly prove it. It could be the case with the Riemann hypothesis, the P versus NP problem, or literally any other unproven mathematical statement. they might be true, but there may be literally no way we could ever prove them, so it might be a waste of time to even try. Level three, Grigori Perelman. In the year 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute put up a $1 million prize for solving the Poincaré conjecture, one of the hardest unsolved problems in mathematics. Even the world's leading mathematicians couldn't find a solution to this problem. That was until out of nowhere Grigori Perelman posted a series of papers online in 2002 and 2003, where he had quietly cracked the problem using ideas from geometry and flow. It took mathematicians years to check his proof, but after all the scrutiny and all the checking, they finally admitted that Perelman had done it. He was the first and only man to ever solve a Millennium Prize problem, but the story only got stranger from there. Perelman turned down the Fields Medal in 2006, and when the $1 million prize was officially offered to him later, he declined.

[00:02:55]Perelman walked away from all the money, all the fame, all the spotlight, and instead chose to live as a recluse in a small apartment in St. Petersburg. But why? Shortly afterwards, [music] we saw him heading straight towards the mountains. Level four, Alexander Grothendieck. In the 1950s and '60s, Grothendieck entered the French mathematical world and started rebuilding algebraic geometry from the ground up. He introduced ideas like schemes, which changed the language of the subject forever. Instead of merely solving one famous puzzle like Perelman, Grothendieck changed a whole field of mathematics. But then in 1970, when he was arguably the most influential mathematician at the time, Grothendieck Groth- Groth- Grothendieck grew disillusioned with the academic world, which he saw as corrupt, bureaucratic, and focused on power rather than truth.

[00:03:47]After that, he withdrew more and more from public mathematics and eventually disappeared entirely into isolation. He spent his final decades writing autobiographical and philosophical texts and avoiding public recognition. Level five, Emmy Noether. Emmy Noether was born in 1882 in Germany and became a absolute monster in the field of abstract algebra. But for years universities didn't even want to hire her because she was a woman.

[00:04:13]Woman.

[00:04:14]>> [laughter] >> Even though she was just a lady person, Noether introduced the concept of an ideal in ring theory, proved the isomorphism theorems, and developed Noetherian rings. Then in 1918 she proved what became known as Noether's theorem, which says that for every continuous symmetry of a physical system there is a corresponding conserved quantity. Level six, Srinivasa Ramanujan. As a teenager living in India, Ramanujan taught himself mathematics using two old textbooks. He became obsessed with maths filling his personal notebooks with thousands of original theorems without any formal training. For a while he was just an office clerk until in 1913 he sent a letter to G.H. Hardy, a mathematician at Cambridge University, full of his theories. Hardy quickly realized that this wasn't the work of a complete skits or taking Adderall, this was the work of genius. In 1914 Hardy helped Ramanujan into England, and once he arrived he kept producing results which looked almost supernatural. Even professional mathematicians struggled to keep up with it. But in 1920, at only 32 years old, Ramanujan died due to what was most likely tuberculosis and malnutrition.

[00:05:21]But he left behind a body of work that still amazes mathematicians to this day.

[00:05:26]Level seven, Évariste Galois. Évariste Galois, as a teenager, was constantly at war with the world around him. He struggled with the French school system, then got involved in politics, and then ended up in prison. But while all that was happening, his brain was concocting mathematical ideas which later became group theory and Galois theory. Galois theory is the framework which tells mathematicians today which equations can or can't be solved using certain methods. Anyway, long story short, big man got himself into a kerfuffle with some bloke and in classic 19th century style, the other bloke was like, "I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL!" [screaming] The night before the duel, Galois stayed up all night not preparing for the duel, but writing down his mathematical ideas.

[00:06:10]The next day he was shot and died at just 20 years old. Level eight, Beetlejuice. 1 - 1 = It goes 35.

[00:06:21]If you want to see me rank the best pi approximations, click this video, otherwise piss off.