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[From Newsweek, June 28, 1993]

Great minds shatter old worlds and bring forth new ones.

In his 1904 "Study of British Genius", Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses were fathered by men older than 30, few had mothers younger than 25, many were sickly as children. Why are there no Freuds, Einsteins or Piccassos today? Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ of 228 is the highest ever reported, has not exactly proved Fermat's last theorem and is, instead, a question-and-answer columnist for Parade magazine. And run-of-the-mill math Ph.D.s have IQs just as high as truly great mathematicians. Geniuses do not merely solve existing problems, like discovering an AIDS cure, they identify new ones. Keith Simonton suggests that geniuses are geniuses because they form more novel combinations than the merely talented. "In a loose sense, genius and change become synonymous," he says. Scientific genius is often marked by an interest in unrelated fields, making novel combinations more likely. In genius there is a tolerance for ambiguity, a patience with unpredictable avenues of thought. Creative geniuses tend to return to the conceptual world of childhood [meno sentimentalmente parlando, se ne infischiano degli altri adulti]. Frank Wilczek in Princeton, 20 years ago deduced how the nuclei of atoms stay together, and now he is thinking about why the empty space doesn't weigh anything.
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Although the amount of gray matter has little to do with genius, how neurons are wired might. Smart people have more complex, more efficient, neural highways for transmitting information: Ph.D.s have a vast, complicated neural web, but high-school dropouts only a sparse, inefficient one. This may explain why geniuses are more adept at bringing together disparate images, thoughts and phrases.
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Ed Witten, 41, has been called the most brilliant physicist of his and quite a few other generations. He is the master of string theory and says about his intellectual arc: "When I was younger I would wake up every morning with the feeling that I was going to have a better idea that day than I had ever had. It's kind of sad to have lost that feeling."
Marilyn vos Savant � la moglie di Jarvik, l'inventore del cuore artificiale. Ha umiliato in uno scontro diretto un esercito di matematici statunitensi.