Who knows?… Slate

Jordan Ellenberg, Slate, on who to listen to, here…

Now I’m old, I’m 30, and I started to realise that all those people who say they know, they actually don’t know. Many of them don’t know, and especially those who say that they know, don’t know, because those who do know say that they don’t know.

The sage speaking here is Anna Kiesenhofer, the Austrian mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and symplectic geometry who stunned world cycling by winning the gold in the Olympic road race on Sunday. She jumped out to a huge early lead, well out of sight of the peloton; apparently Kiesenhofer was considered such a noncontender that the higher-ranked riders didn’t notice she wasn’t with them in the group. When Dutch rider Annemiek van Vleuten crossed the line at the front of the pack, she thought she’d come in first—but Kiesenhofer had finished more than a minute earlier.