Who's your favourite genius (or geniuses)?

[TheFreaksShallInheritTheEarth]

Who are your favourite geniuses?

I'm a little bit obsessed with Nikola Tesla. He was mind-blowingly brilliant and such a visionary. Sadly, many of his inventions were destroyed or appropriated and the credit given to others (Marconi, Edison and Westinghouse I'm looking at you) and he died penniless.

Also Beethoven. He composed the best piece of music ever (his ninth symphony) when he was profoundly deaf!

Whose genius do you most admire? I'm particularly interested to read about less well known ones 🙂

I hugely admire Isembard Kingdom Brunel for his engineering feats and wonder what more he might have achieved if he had not died so young.

Alan Turing and Joan Clarke.

Shortened the war - probably by years.

Rosalind Franklin, Peter Ellis (architect) and Artemisia Gentileschi (Renaissance artist)

Good call with IKB!

Pleased to see Joan Clarke and Rosalind Franklin mentioned. Neither have received the recognition they deserve for their important contributions.
And, sadly, we know why.

Tesla for me 👌

Paul Dirac and also Robert Hooke.
Though I struggle to understand a lot of the science, I find them both endlessly fascinating characters.

Marie-Sophie Germain, French mathematician who significantly contributed to the theory of numbers and the application of her theory to elasticity. As often happened with female academics her hard work was stolen by a man and passed off as his own research.

plus Alan Turing was one of the Foundational contributors to what is now generically called Artificial intelligence "getting computers to do tasks at least as well as, if not better than, humans"

Really a huge fan of visonaries like Tony Wilson and Peter Saville. Insane contributions to music, culture and visual arts, too visionary for their own good.

Bump for the evening crowd... hopefully they're a little more appreciative of genius 😃

Clearly not! 🤷‍♀️

I'd heard of Tony Wilson,
@FastFood , but not Peter Wilson. A quick Google tells me that I am familiar with his work, though.

Seconded. On reading the title thread, the first 'genius' who sprang to mind was actually Vini Reilly - the greatest guitarist nobody's ever heard of! How nice to have shoehorned in all these Factorians within the first page!

Hedy Lamarr. Managed to be both a Hollywood bombshell and also co-invented a frequency jamming system that (in some ways) formed the basis of the internet (massively simplified explanation and I'm not a genius, so can't explain but, yes, she was very clever).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

👍🏼 Gentileschi - not a name I thought I’d ever see here

Björk, Prince, Michel Gondry all for incredible inventiveness and variety in music and film.

Beethoven. Love that was a grumpy introvert too.

Gentileschi, Georgia O’Keefe, Cornelia Parker and Judy Chicago are my favourite artist geniuses.

St Hilda of Whitby and Aethelflaed of Mercia made a big impact on me when I read Femina. Astonishingly cultured and inspiring women. Eleanor of Aquitaine too.

Maya Angelou, Jane Austen and George Eliot are my literary geniuses.

Not to mention getting married six times!

Yes 👑 😁

Jane Austen too. Love the fact that she purposely chose to be a spinster in a society that only really valued married women. And wrote books that are STILL so funny and relevant.

Ah, OP, I can't agree about the 9th symphony.

It was going so well, then he decided to shove a choir in.

If he really wanted to rework the choral fantasy, he could have done a separate piece. It just Doesn't Go.

And William Wilberforce. Perhaps not a genius, but a bloody good egg.

Doesn't go? Oh I don't know... that piece of music has been part of my life since I was a young child, so I don't even think about it 'going', it just... is.
Whatever, it was undeniably revolutionary to have had choral and solo voices on a classical piece like this - this was probably the first symphony of its kind - and the whole message and aesthetic of it, with the brilliant music and singing is truly divine "Freude freude!"
And would you believe it, Beethoven was DEAF!! 😀

I love all these posts, especially about all the brilliant women.
Thanks everyone.