alt Hacker NewsThere are plenty of humans that will never "get" calculus, despite numerous attempts at the class and countless hours of 1:1 tutoring. Are those people not intelligent? Do they not think? We could say yes they aren't, but by the metric of making money, plenty of people are smart enough to be rich, while college math professors aren't. And while that's a facile way of measuring someone's worth or their contribution to society (some might even say "bad"), it remains that even if someone cant understand calculus, some of them are intelligent enough to understand humans enough to be rich through some fashion that wasn't simply handed to them.
I don't think it's actually true that someone with:
1. A desire to learn calculus 2. A good teacher 3. No mental impairments such as dementia or other major brain drainers
could not learn calculus. Most people don't really care to try or don't get good resources. What you see as an intelligent mathematician is almost always someone born with better resources that was also encouraged to pursue math.