“If you’re frustrated or discouraged, then your collaborator might share some light and pull you out.”
Fan Chung has over 300 papers and 150 coauthors, including 101 joint papers with her late husband Ron Graham. The interview makes a solid case that math is not actually a solitary genius sport. Chung improved a Ramsey theory bound as a grad student in 1971 that nobody has topped in over fifty years. Her point about Paul Erdos acting as a “pollen-spreading bee” carrying problems between institutions is a nice way to describe what collaboration actually looks like when it works.