Word: brilliants
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...father John Neville Keynes was a noted Cambridge economist. His mother Florence Ada Keynes became mayor of Cambridge. Young John was a brilliant student but didn't immediately aspire to either academic or public life. He wanted to run a railroad. "It is so easy...and fascinating to master the principles of these things," he told a friend, with his usual modesty. But no railway came along, and Keynes ended up taking the civil service exam. His lowest mark was in economics. "I evidently knew more about Economics than my examiners," he later explained...
...Wittgenstein's Cambridge seminar on the foundations of mathematics included a brilliant young mathematician, Alan Turing, who was giving his own course that term on the same topic. Turing too had been excited by the promise of mathematical logic and, like Wittgenstein, had come to see that it had limitations. But in the course of Turing's formal proof that the dream of turning all mathematics into logic was strictly impossible, he had invented a purely conceptual device--now known as a Universal Turing Machine--that provided the logical basis for the digital computer. And whereas Wittgenstein's dream...
That he was fast, there was no doubt. And hungry too. After taking brilliant advantage of the amazing public education available to New Yorkers in the first half of this century, this son of Orthodox Polish-Jewish immigrants whizzed through his medical training to fetch up at the University of Michigan an enviable fellowship to study virology under the distinguished Dr. Thomas Francis--who, incidentally, would remain in Salk's corner for life, politics or no politics...
Even by his field's indulgent standards, Reich was surely one for the casebooks. Brilliant and charismatic, the Austrian-born psychoanalyst was an early disciple of Freud and produced a shrewd addition to analytic theory: a patient's character, he said, was revealed as much by body language--"muscular armoring," he called it--as by couch talk. Before long Reich split with Freud and went off on his own wobbly path. After dabbling with Marxism, he began theorizing about a universal life-giving "orgone energy"--which, he said, was expressed through neurosis-free orgasms. He fled...
...corresponding with a genius. Unlike trained mathematicians, Ramanujan knew his speculations about numbers were true, so he didn't bother to prove them. That wouldn't do. Hardy brought him to England in 1914, and the pair spent four years working to prove the self-taught mathematician's intuitively brilliant conjectures. Alas, Ramanujan hated England and died of tuberculosis in 1920 at age 32--with so much of his opus left unproved that mathematicians today are still working...