This is actually closer to what Grothendieck writes in Recoltes et Semailles:

"Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the "invisible yet formidable boundaries" that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn't even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child play."

http://www.fermentmagazine.org/rands/promenade11.html

Wow! I've been looking for an english translation of Recoltes et Semailles for a while. I see now it's easily reachable by google (oops), but still, thanks!

re: Only innocence can surmount them ... when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child play. — Grothendieck

Apropos is something another Frenchman once said:

"Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation." — Flaubert

I love this analogy. One of my former professors once explained pure mathematics as a pitch black room, and writing proofs is like wandering around in that room looking for a light source -- often stubbing a few toes along the way. Once a proof is complete, a light has illuminated the room for others to enter safely. The mathematician often finds the room boring and moves on to another pitch black room.

The hard work is wandering around in the dark. Intelligence is the ability and willingness to wander around.

Andrew Wiles said much the same on solving FLT: "Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—and couldn't exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/andrew-wiles-fermat.htm...

Great metaphor, but I think smartness is something even lesser than a torch. Creativity, it seems, is the torch that helps you find the right wedge. Smartness is probably what tells you to look for a wedge in the first place.

I was going to reply saying _Creativity_ is the wedge.

Well said. Similar to work smart not hard. Here's one - "don't work hard, be smart"