Great question! I am just finishing a book on genius that is the culmination of several years of research on the greatest geniuses since Archimedes. This is an excerpt from that book that may help to answer your question. (There is a full chapter on Erdos, that looks specifically at mathematical research and the changing nature of genius in mathematics.) I hope you enjoy this excerpt!
The Nature of Genius
Synthesize Intelligences to a Shared Vision
For centuries the popular image of genius was the solitary thinker. From Archimedes to Isaac Newton, from Nikola Tesla to Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, the greatest breakthroughs of science seemed to emerge from minds working largely alone, pursuing the sudden illumination of the Eureka moment. In this traditional picture, discovery appeared almost sculptural: the lone genius shaping ideas into gems like Dirac’s “exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky.”
With John von Neumann, however, the character of genius began to change. Restless, sociable, and astonishingly versatile, Johnny moved easily across the frontiers of mathematics and physics, leaving new insights wherever he went. Rather than remaining confined to a single problem, he roamed among disciplines, refining the ideas of others and extending them in unexpected directions. At Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, his role in the work on the hydrodynamics of the plutonium implosion bomb illustrated this emerging model. Von Neumann was less a conventional leader than an intellectual catalyst—a roving consultant whose penetrating insights energized the work of those around him. Genius here was no longer purely solitary; it had begun to operate within a network of brilliant collaborators.
The transformation reached its fullest expression in the wartime leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer. As director of Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer revealed a new dimension of intellectual greatness: the ability to assemble a community of extraordinary minds and weld them into a single creative enterprise. His achievement suggested that the greatest breakthroughs of modern science might arise not only from individual insight, but from a rare capacity to orchestrate the talents of many. Genius, in this sense, became an act of synthesis.
In the technological age that followed, this expanded conception of genius would become increasingly familiar. The transformative innovations of the modern world often emerge not from solitary flashes of insight, but from visionary individuals who imagine unprecedented goals and mobilize teams capable of achieving them. Figures such as Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are frequently described as the geniuses of the twenty-first century. Their genius lies not merely in solitary discovery, but in the ability to envision revolutionary possibilities and bring together the talent required to make them real.
