Sangjoon Bob Lee

How Oppenheimer learned any subject insanely fast: "At Göttingen he learned enough Italian in a month to read Dante. At Leiden he learned Dutch in six weeks and then stood up and lectured on quantum mechanics in Dutch, which was the point. He wanted the difficulty, not the credit. Years later Isidor Rabi would needle him for it: Dutch in six weeks, and he never learned Yiddish. The same appetite took him to Sanskrit. Thursday evenings with Arthur Ryder, then the Gita in the original, which he told his brother was “very easy and quite marvellous.” His friends thought the obsession was strange. Harold Cherniss did not. “He liked things that were difficult,” Cherniss said. “And since almost everything was easy for him, the things that really would attract his attention were essentially the difficult.” That was the whole method. If a thing yielded quickly, he discarded it. If it resisted, he stayed until he could teach it. Charles Lauritsen watched the same mind in a classroom and said he always gave you the answer before you had finished forming the question. James Franck walked out of Oppenheimer’s oral exam and told a colleague he had gotten out just in time, because the student had started examining him. He read Marx in German on a train. He kept the worn pink Gita nearest the desk and handed copies to friends as if the book were a tool. Nothing in him was built for the long, humble apprenticeship. He picked the hard thing on purpose, burned through it, and was already speaking in its language before most men had finished the first chapter."