You're actually a little mislead. Proving that splay trees don't suck and inventing amortized analysis made Danny Sleator famous. Coming up with and coding it took him less than an hour (from his own mouth which might be embellished). If you look at the full proof of its log(n) running time, you'll realize that splay trees are incredibly complex.
Sleator is also an amazing problem solver. He can outcome most of the people commenting on this thread but isn't necessarily the best architect.
I believe algo is about problem solving. If you don't understand it, you don't know when to use which tool. Its unecessary if you're writing boilerplate and solved problems with frameworks but when you get to the google/amazon level, you can't just write good code. You need to understand algo to create dynamo and write dremel and mapreduce.
I agree with everything you say I just don't understand why you say that I am mislead.
Of course he could code it in one hour. Probably he came up with it in a bright moment. But a researcher has to think for years to come up with something so successful, and most of their ideas suck.
"Sleator is also an amazing problem solver. He can outcome most of the people commenting on this thread but isn't necessarily the best architect."
Which is what I think exactly.
"I believe algo is about problem solving."
Not just problem solving, but a kind of problem solving. algo is some kind of mathematical thinking. To be a extremely good at algorithmization you have to be extremely good in a kind of mathematical thinking. Of course those people who are extremely good at it like Sleator (or Von Neumann etc...) are extremely smart, so they are probably very good at other things also, but algorithmization is not a general purpose intelligence, it is a kind of 'mathematical intelligence'.
Sleator is also an amazing problem solver. He can outcome most of the people commenting on this thread but isn't necessarily the best architect.
I believe algo is about problem solving. If you don't understand it, you don't know when to use which tool. Its unecessary if you're writing boilerplate and solved problems with frameworks but when you get to the google/amazon level, you can't just write good code. You need to understand algo to create dynamo and write dremel and mapreduce.