, by
Dan Greenburg
Spice Merchant Dhirubhai AmbaniAmassed family fortune of more than $60 billion, sufficient for his son, Mukesh, to build a 27-story private home in Mumbai. |
Former Community College Student Craig VenterDeveloped shotgun gene sequencing technique and founded Celera Genomics, a private company that raced ahead of the government-funded Human Genome Project. |
Child of Japanese and Korean immigrants Sho YanoEarned PhD in biology at age 18 while attending medical school, from which he received an MD at age 21. |
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. |
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