He proceeds just as deliberately when doing mathematics. Wang was shocked when he first witnessed it. “I have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have to be clever, you have to be fast,” he said. “But June is the opposite. … If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, you’d think this guy wouldn’t pass a qualifying exam. He’s very slow.” So slow, in fact, that at first Wang thought they were wasting a lot of time on easy problems they already understood. But then he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.
Having gone through the American education system, I felt like I was in a factory being evaluated as a potential end product. Steamroll through as much material as quickly as possible. Optimize behavioral patterns for the next performance metric. Rinse and repeat. Is this really the best system we can come up with? Can the pace of mathematical and scientific advancement be optimized by steamrollers? I wonder how much potential we've missed as a society because the education system has been trying to force everyone through the same hole, and destroying intellectual curiosity in the process.
Personally, my experience with this educational system turned me off from "math." It was only much later in life when I learnt that the mindless algorithms that I had to personally execute for years on end to get into university could barely be considered math at all. Only then could I begin to appreciate how elegant real math could be. And I doubt I'm alone in my experience.