Ten Unsung Geniuses
BY TOM SIEGFRIED
It’s easy to name science and math geniuses. I can just flip open my old book from the 1960s, which lists “100 Great Scientists”; it contains all the names you’d find on most popular lists of scientific geniuses: Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, Bohr, Archimedes, Darwin, Galileo, and 92 others.
But the geniuses of popular notoriety aren’t the only great minds of scientific history. That book and other such lists overlook many deserving names—the unsung geniuses overshadowed by more publicity-savvy rivals or under-appreciated because of when and where they lived. Presented below are my Top 10 of those insufficiently recognized scientific geniuses of all time, listed in chronological order.
Keep in mind that this is science and math only, so no Shakespeare, no Bobby Fischer, no Lennon and McCartney. Also, nobody still living is eligible—wouldn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.
And remember, for list-making purposes, genius shouldn’t simply be thought of as high IQ. It’s more a combination of intellectual capacity and what was achieved with it. Geniuses transcend the time in which they live, contributing insights that allow future scientists to be smarter than the geniuses of the past. All the people listed here did that. If there’s someone you think should have made the cut, by all means, let Nautilus know in the comments below.
By age 11, Borel’s genius was apparent enough that he left home to receive more advanced instruction and eventually made his way to Paris, where he observed that the most exciting and fulfilling lives were led by mathematicians. He became an enormously productive scholar, with major contributions to set theory (the branch of math that studies the properties of collections of objects) and probability theory. And in the 1920s he established many of the fundamental principles of game theory (the math for calculating optimum strategies)—unknown to John von Neumann, who invented them all over again.
1. Amalie Emmy Noether (Germany, 1882-1935)
In the mid-19th century, several men figured out the law of conservation of energy, but it was Emmy Noether who figured out why energy is conserved. It’s a consequence of a symmetry in nature, specifically the symmetry of time—physical law remaining the same in the future as it has been in the past. What’s more, she showed that other symmetries also require conservation laws—symmetry in spatial direction guarantees conservation of angular momentum, for example. Noether contributed to many other realms of math, especially abstract algebra, and clarified some of the mathematical aspects of general relativity. Despite years of discrimination, she was eventually allowed to join the faculty at Göttingen, after the esteemed mathematician David Hilbert pointed out that the faculty senate was not a bathhouse.
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