Aid to Evaluating Your Accomplishments

part of Career Guide for Engineers and Scientists
Compare yourself to these four ordinary people who were selected at random:

University Dropout Carl Friedrich Gauss

By 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.

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Madras Clerk Srinivasa Ramanujan

After 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.

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Former Community College Student Craig Venter

Developed shotgun gene sequencing technique and founded Celera Genomics, a private company that raced ahead of the government-funded Human Genome Project.

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Spice Merchant Dhirubhai Ambani

Amassed family fortune of more than $60 billion, sufficient for his son, Mukesh, to build a 27-story private home in Mumbai.

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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


philg@mit.edu