> because he had a photographic memory and just so happened to leaf through a book containing a required proof

It makes for good rumours and TV show plots, but this sort of "photographic memory" has never been shown to actually exist.

I dunno, I went to a high school reunion last year, and a dude seemed to know people's phone numbers from 30 years ago.

If he could remember that sort of thing, I can believe there are people who can remember steps of a proof, which is a much less random thing that you can feel your way around, given a few queues from memory.

Plus, realistically, how closely does an examiner read a proof? They have a stack of dozens of almost the same thing, I bet they get pretty tired of it and use a heuristic.

Huh, TIL [0]. Thanks. There are people who can perform extraordinary memory feats, but they're very rare and/or self-trained.

[0] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/542

>His photographic memory manifested itself early — he would amuse his parents’ friends by instantly memorizing pages of phone books on command.

https://medium.com/young-spurs/the-unsung-genius-of-john-von...