Accidental astrophysicists

They started with algebra and ended up learning about gravitational lensing

Dmitry Khavinson and Genevra Neumann didn’t know anything about astrophysics. They were just doing mathematics, like they always do, following their curiosity. In 2004, they posted a new result, an extension of the fundamental theorem of algebra, on arXiv.org, a preprint server.

BENDING STARLIGHT The light rays coming from the star S will be bent by the gravity of the massive body at L.