A reassuring story for those of us who feel we are strong in many areas but fear we have deep, dangerous holes in certain fundamentals.

This vignette explains part of something I hadn't understood about the emergence of Heisenberg's work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg#Matrix_mecha... ): he seemed to work out the core theory of QM without really developing a sensible, general approach. Compare this to Newton, who did develop calculus to explain mechanics (even if we these days use Leibniz's contemporaneous work). In Heisenberg's case, Born was the one who realized that we should use matrices.

It's still weird that Born didn't get the nobel for this work and had to wait 20 more years to get one.