A lot of genius stories are like this. I was also under the illusion that these guys could just do things that fast, but at some point, I read Feynman's biography where he explicitly talks about how he used to solve homework problems or something beforehand and then he used to pretend that he found the solution while solving it if his classmates asked.
That threw me for a loop and I started believing shit like no one's smarter than I was etc. Then I just ... grew up, I guess. And I remembered this story by Feynman and I realised that despite his absolutely undoubtable genius, he'd have appeared godlike to me if I was his classmate back in the day.
Ramanujan's brain worked even faster by most accounts. He dreamed in math, I think. So there are multiple stories where people ask him a puzzle and he'll answer with an equation that solves it for the entire family of problems that the puzzle could come from.
That threw me for a loop and I started believing shit like no one's smarter than I was etc. Then I just ... grew up, I guess. And I remembered this story by Feynman and I realised that despite his absolutely undoubtable genius, he'd have appeared godlike to me if I was his classmate back in the day.
Ramanujan's brain worked even faster by most accounts. He dreamed in math, I think. So there are multiple stories where people ask him a puzzle and he'll answer with an equation that solves it for the entire family of problems that the puzzle could come from.