During one of my advanced courses for my M.S. Machine Learning degree, this old Computer Science professor made borderline impossible worksheets. He was the stereotypical CS professor with a ponytail and glasses, and he believed the best way to teach was to give students time to try and solve complicated problems independently. His theory was that once he taught us how to solve them, we would appreciate the theory more since it made a problem that stumped us understandable.

Anyways, he would give us a worksheet with 4 to 6 questions and 4 hours to solve them in pairs. Most of the class could do one or two in the allocated time. The biggest outlier was this international student from Singapore who solved many of them each time. He wasn't even from our program - he was from the Mathematics department, taking the class for extra credit.

One day, I partnered with him to solve some graph problems, and we progressed well. We only got stuck on the last question, which was the type of question you had to read five times for it to make sense. It was on a completely different level than all the others. We started working on it and kept bouncing around ideas for about one hour.

Then, this guy has a brilliant insight and approaches the problem from a completely different branch of Mathematics. He solves it in just a few lines after that. We call the professor and show the solution to see if it's right. He looks at us wide-eyed like we're aliens.

It turns out he put an unsolved problem as the last question. It came up during one of his PhD students' research and stumped both. He put it in our worksheet just to see if someone could make some progress on it. My partner solved it in one hour flat. I was both impressed and thankful this guy was my partner lol.

My husband is like this. He was fixing the electricity for his mom's renter at 14. He takes stuff apart and fixes it... Sometimes I want a new appliance, though. He didn't want to pay 15k for a new boiler install, so he decided he would learn about it and do it. It's perfect. He has done our plumbing, electric, building, makes me furniture, rigs cool lighting, surround sound, landscaping, fixes our cars, builds computers from scratch, puts networks together, and troubleshoots computers... There is only one thing that regularly stumps him... me! :).

I've got a number of them, but one in particular - my friend who was a car mechanic who couldn't do it anymore because his lungs were being negatively affected, too much exposure to exhaust. I've been in computers for decades, and figured if I used automotive terminology, I could describe some computer concepts so he could work in computers. My God, he picked it up so astonishingly fast that he started his own computer repair business. He was smarter than your average bear when it came to automotive things, too. He added a Corvette transmission to an old diesel pickup truck and could go way over the speed limit and get 50 mpg all day, too. He restored old cars and motorcycles and would frequently modify them to operate better than when new. A naturally brilliant guy all the way around and a great person to know. Crazy. Out of the box thinker too, which I like.

My dad, who would be 102 this year, lived on a farm. The neighbor called my grandparents and said he heard that he had the best mechanic and could he borrow him. When my 13-year-old father showed up, the guy couldn’t believe it. My dad said, “Do you want your tractor fixed or not?” He fixed it, collected his payment, and left.