What do you all think about the role of genius in making discoveries in mathematics today? Are you screwed if you're not a genius? Or is working hard, good collaboration, and wide-reading all that is needed?
But oppositely, the definition of genius overall is fairly fuzzy.
And especially, people have made important contributions to mathematics without showing "early promise".
If you're unlucky you work hard on a dead end, if people can see you work hard all the time your results are not effortless enough to be the work of a genius, and if you don't have a hype-man you'll at most be seen as very good.
Then you need hard work and good collaboration, also necessary .
But if you have the latter without the former you risk to end up miserable
Once you are at that level, then one could conceivably think that luck+hardwork might be enough to get you results, but when you are considerably smarter, you can work much faster than others, and maybe even make connections that others will never be able to make.