, by
Dan Greenburg
Unemployed Californian Larry EllisonAfter being divorced by his first wife because she said that he would never amount to anything or make any money, started Oracle Corporation, world's leading supplier of relational database management software (Note to academic computer scientists: don't worry if you aren't sure what an RDBMS is; it isn't necessary for running Microsoft Word). |
Judean Carpenter Jesus of NazarethTold young women he was God and they believed him. |
Madras Clerk Srinivasa RamanujanAfter failing his school examinations, Ramanujan obtained a position as a clerk in the city of Madras. Before his death at age 32, made fundamental advances in mathematics including Riemann series, the elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series and functional equations of the zeta function. |
Tuberculosis Sufferer Niels Henrik AbelDeveloped group theory, proved the binomial theorem, and did important work in quintic equations and elliptic functions prior to his death at age 26. |
Programmed by Eve Astrid Andersson and Philip Greenspun back in the mid-1990s. If you're a nerd, you might find the source code useful.
Original Inspiration: How to Make Yourself Miserable