Alex Eskin recalled that, during working sessions, she could recognize a surface at a glance—a talent that engaged all her senses, because she literally perceived its "personality." She covered her desk with large white sheets filled with sketches, drew her proofs, and then spoke of them as genuine stories. She often described journeys through these spaces and approached problems in original ways. As she told her doctoral students: "I don't try to understand a problem; I try to become friends with it."
Whenever a question held her up for too long, she would clear her desk completely—including every sheet and sketch—and start again from scratch, so that she felt she was "encountering the problem as a new visitor." Her colleagues nicknamed her the "slow genius": she took an unusually long time to let her ideas mature before producing spectacular results.
