[morelandjs]

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.

Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!

[BeetleB]

I don't want to take away from his brilliance, but generally Taylor approximations perform far worse than the standard library implementations. It's also the first tool of choice for physicists, so who knows ...?

My guess, though, is that if he improved the performance, he used some other wizardry (Chebyshev or something similar).

[whatshisface]

Sometimes what you need is less precision, much faster. Carmack's famous inverse square root falls into this category.

If anything it's a lesson that the definition of brilliance is being in the wrong place at the wrong time... ;-)

[morelandjs]

https://github.com/Duke-QCD/trento/blob/master/src/fast_exp....

Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.

[dingnuts]

Honestly the whole story sounds like a tall tale to me.

> He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry

I doubt this. Really, really doubt this. Sure, geniuses exist, but I don't buy it.

[fooker]

The standard library implementations use Taylor approximations

[adastra22]

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with were college dropouts.