Corsican Lieutenant Napoleon BonaparteConquered most of Europe and Egypt. Emancipated the Jews throughout Europe. |
University Dropout Carl Friedrich GaussBy the age of 21, he had constructed a regular 17-gon by ruler and compasses, the most major advance in this field since the time of the Greeks. Subsequently developed method of least squares, normal probability distribution, Fast Fourier Transform, and a non-Euclidean geometry. |
Patent Office Clerk A. EinsteinFormulated Theory of Relativity. |
Hartford Connecticut Insurance Executive Wallace StevensWon Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954; best known for "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". |
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, by Dan Greenburg