Your six year old came up with a new recursive prime generator over the course of a conversation introducing him to the concept of primes, and then submitted this as a paper to arXiv? Do you have a link to this paper on arXiv?
It was self-deprecating humor aimed at acknowledging that all parents are pretty sure their children are the smartest humans to have ever walked the earth.
At least that was my reading and it gave me a chuckle.
My apologies, I was just slow on the uptake, and this being HN, although I was incredulous, I was also fully prepared for you to come back with a link!
I get the joke, now that I know it was a joke. You never know who's on the other side of the wire, and for all I know you might have some genius kid. My 5 year old is into Nerf guns and Mario, but again, this _is_ HN...
Anyway, I'll take my downvotes and move on. Thanks for sharing the story, I might try explaining it like this to my kids!
Basically an "apple falling on Newton's head = discovered gravity" kind of story people eat up about invention and science. Which always seems to gloss over the endless hard work and constant failure and self-doubt they went through. Plus the incidental ancillary work done in related fields which helped spawn the initial seeds.
Although there may be a useful metaphor here that the solutions are often easier or more "obvious" than they seem, and people often get lost in the details and busywork, missing the forest for the trees. So having a simple (but receptive) wall to bounce ideas off of (such as a 6yr old) helps break through the noise to focus on core / fundamental / primitive ideas from which more complex breakthroughs spawn.
Your six year old came up with a new recursive prime generator over the course of a conversation introducing him to the concept of primes, and then submitted this as a paper to arXiv? Do you have a link to this paper on arXiv?