Frail Lincolnshire Lad I. NewtonDuring an 18-month school vacation, developed calculus, inverse square law of gravitation, and laws of motion. |
Hartford Connecticut Insurance Executive Wallace StevensWon Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954; best known for "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". |
Encyclopedia Americana staff writer Norbert WienerReceived Ph.D. from Harvard at age 18, subsequently founded field of communication science/cybernetics. |
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). |
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