The sad reality is that without a good presentation, genius will take a long time to be discovered, if indeed it is genius.<p>There are many examples, but doubtlessly the most dramatic ones are Ramanujan and Galois. Ramanujan had no training and at first glance his work looked indistinguishable from the flood of crank mathematics that most professional mathematicians are familiar with. Were it not for Hardy&#x27;s work in giving form to Ramanujan&#x27;s ideas, they may have been lost forever.<p>In Galois&#x27;s case, he was <i>terrible</i> at explaining his ideas, brilliant as they were. The anecdote of him throwing the eraser at his examiners is an example of his frustrations in trying to communicate to others. He himself was aware of his bad presentation, as he even called his work &quot;gâchis&quot; (mess).<p>Even now, with the hindsight of knowing what he&#x27;s talking about, it&#x27;s extremely hard to read his original papers. For example, he doesn&#x27;t write down formulas and he doesn&#x27;t fix notation. He just <i>describes</i> them in very ambiguous terms, talking about &quot;this&quot; or &quot;that&quot; where it&#x27;s difficult to always determine what &quot;this&quot; or &quot;that&quot; refers to. This is why it took over 30 years after his death for Liouville to notice that Galois was a genius.