Albert Einstein
“Fry was impossible to work with, mentally troubled, locked in himself,” Caldwell wrote. “But let us not forget that he was a prophet, too, and put himself in harm’s way to prevent the future he saw unrolling before him. Not the ideal person, maybe. But certainly the kind that every generation has always had too few of.”
Dara Horn • People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
Albert Einstein was a consummate daydreamer; he preferred the term gedankenexperiments, the original German name for thought experiments. During one such gedankenexperiment, while he was picturing riding a beam of light and imagining what time and space would look like, Einstein came up with the relationship between energy and matter that he famous
... See moreBrad Jacobs • How to Make a Few Billion Dollars
Alexander Grothendieck, who I also discussed in my review of The Art of Learning , was one of the most productive, generative, and eccentric mathematicians of the 20th century. Grothendieck was also an energetic alien. According to multiple sources, he went through a ten-year period during which he invented (I suspect he would say discovered
... See moreStephen Malina • Stephen Malina
