These "thought experiments" were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown.

was known as a young genius in math calculations

We can invent computers capable of processing ten million calculations per second.

More of them, though, will skip those calculations altogether and just power through the holidays into 2017: More than half of American workers don't use up all of their allotted vacation days each year.

Whether this is right, and if so where and when the ecological axe will fall, is hard to determine with any precision—which is why governments and financial institutions are only beginning to bring such risks into their economic calculations.