June Huh wasn’t a math prodigy. He was a high school dropout who wanted to be a poet. But instead of writing verses, he found beauty in numbers—and ended up solving some of the hardest math problems in history. Huh cracked a 50-year-old puzzle in combinatorics, the math of patterns, arrangements, and hidden structures. His discoveries connect math to everything from AI to internet search engines, changing how we optimize systems and process information.
This episode explores how an outsider rewrote the rules of mathematics, proving that you don’t have to be a child genius to change the world. If you’ve ever struggled with math, this story might just make you see it in a whole new way.