...and the three bears
Henry counts to thirteen, which is awesome, not only because it's prime and a good place to take a breather before heading into those foreboding high teens, but because of all the numbers he invents after 13: eleventeen is my favorite. Can I claim that means he can count to 110? I'm ready to call mensa.
Speaking of which, a recent article I stumbled across asked where all the geniuses have gone. Could Einstein have been the last genius, it postulated. The article talked about the rise of collaborative science, and argued that individual contributions seemed to be on the decline.
But it's not bleak at all. A trend has emerged based on 'group leaders', professors or industry leaders who are quite bright who lead teams of scientists to make progress that no one person could on their own. Take for example the trend of awarding Nobel prizes to teams of scientists. On an everyday basis, everybody in science sees that this is true. My last lab where I postdoc'd had 20-25 postdocs. My Ph.D. lab was the same. Both of these were mini-corporations whose 'jobs' were to push the envelope of science. Both were led by brilliant scientists.
A nice example of an extremely talented team leader industry was Elmer K. Bolton, who led chemical research at DuPont in the first half of the 20'th century. Under his leadership, Du Pont produced nylon, neoprene and many modern wonders we take for granted. A mild-mannered Bucknell alum of 1908, Bolton would have to select which few of a myriad of projects his scientists brought to him every week would go forward, and had a knack for picking not just winners, but big winners. He is perhaps best recognized for deciding to find new and cheaper routes to nylon when others had given up on it. Bolton humbly never accepted scientific credit for the discoveries of others in his team, yet his mystique is that none of these things would have come to pass without his leadership and he was widely recognized for this.
Where are the geniuses? First of all, what is genius? In my book, it is the ability to recognize that something is true without necessarily knowing why. Was Bolton a genius? Hard to say - but nobody is that lucky so he was at least close. But the famed mathematician Ramanujan illustrates exactly this. He died far too young, but left behind a tremendous number of theorems, which mathematicians have steadily tackled and proven over the years. Richard Feynman, anybody? Love him or hate him, he was the real thing. He once tried to describe how things worked in his head. He wrote about how he would form abstract models in his mind and try to "fit" them together. With Feynman you have to ask if he was just saying this for fun or if he really meant it, but I'll go with the latter. English mathemetician Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem; to be fair, Wiles was standing on the shoulders of giants, but it was a one man show all the same.