I suddenly remember a massive thread a while back where dopers were asked to list their most obscure facts and somebody mentioned that they were the worlds leading authority on a particularly obscure chess move. I just wondered how many other people are considered THE expert in anything, no matter how obscure.
Questions:
How many people would you estimate are in the same field?
How long did you have to study before you were considered it?
By what authority did you become the expert (ie. international accreditation, awards, reputation etc.)
BTW: I know this topic would be ripe for hijack so serious replies only if you can help it. “the effect on peruvian blowfish toxin on south african cane toads” would be appropriate whereas “making pasta sauce while blindfolded” would probably not.
. . . and note that a review of my new book called me (and I quote) “one of the world’s best film historians.”
Then I stop blushing and add that the reviewer is on a web-site I have never heard of, and she spelled my name wrong. So I’d amend that I am “one of the world’s top two or three hundred film historians.”
Written by Bill Gates, Paul Allen, & Monte Davidoff, it was Microsoft’s first product and therefore of some historical interest.
Last year I disassembled their code (all 4K of it) and published the annotated disassembly plus a series of overviews explaining how the future billionaires had tackled the task of fitting a BASIC into just 4K. It was fun to do and was of some interest to other software developers.
Monte helped me out with a lot of it (drawing from 25 year old memories!) and when it was done he said I was now probably the world’s expert on that product!
I work for a video game company called 3DO. These days, we just write software. But back in the mid 90’s, when I started, we had our own hardware platform (famous for costing way too much money when it first shipped). And then we developed a second generation hardware platform, the famous M2. It ended up being sold to Matsushita, and we ended up getting out of the hardware business.
Anyhow, I spent a lot of time writing sample code demonstrating how to effectively render 2D graphics on the M2, so I think that for a while it was fair to say that I was the world’s leading expert in the field of 2D graphics on the M2. Which, if the M2 had been even as successful as the first 3DO platform, would have been a lot cooler and more meaningful than it ended up being…
I guess I qualify as an expert on automotive wheel trim. I have been collecting and selling used hubcaps/wheel covers/center caps since I was three years old. I can identify the year, make and model of any hubcap dating back to around 1975, plus many earlier ones. I can drive down the highway, spot a hubcap lying upside down in the shoulder, and know what cap it is and whether it’s in good enough condition to bother retrieving it. It’s kind of hard to become an internationally recognized hubcap expert, but if anyone cared enough to track down the best in the field, I like to think I’d come out somewhere in the top fifty or so.
Andrew L
Disclaimer: Please do not email me asking to buy hubcaps, because a) the SDMB probably doesn’t want me using this board as a sales outlet and b) I am now a college student away from home, so I can’t do shipping orders expediently anymore, anyway. Sorry!
I’m probably becoming the nation’s expert on African rue (a weed found in the Southa and Intermountain West). Yeah, I think by the time my thesis is done, I’ll be there.
I have conducted extensive research on Colonial Connecticut. And am asked at least twice or thrice a year to speak at the University of Connecticut and University of Rhode Island on the 17th century Pequot wars and colonization of coastal Connecticut.
And have assisted on countless digs throughout coastal RI and CT looking at early settlements of the Winthrop Era and prior.
I doubt I am the worlds foremost authority on the subject but i do know a heck of a lot about subjects.
I used to be one of a handful of the world’s experts on a mathematical graph-coloring variant called L(2,1)-labellings. IIRC, you could have then counted on your fingers everybody who’d published in that narrow subfield of graph theory. This should impress absolutely nobody.
I published a book on military codewords (DESERT STORM, OVERLORD, JUST Cause) and so am the world’s leading authority on that subject. We only sold about a thousand copies of the book, so I am as they say outstanding (alone) in my field.
There’s a small aspect of linguistics I was briefly the expert on. I was one of the leading theoretical experts on testing artificial intelligence systems at one point. Whoopie. It was just like knowing anything else, except there was nobody to talk to at my level.
There weren’t many people in those parts of the field then, and aren’t that many now. A few hundred?
I was the expert because other experts were listening to me, inviting me to speak on IEEE panels, write papers, patents, etc.
It took under a year to become expert in both areas (and only a couple years to lose the expertise). This was because they were unpopular academic areas that were considered career-limiting by the mainstream.
My father’s best friend reinvented the business valuation aspect of accounting. He’s written text books and speaks all over the world. Apparently, everyone uses his methods.
My father is one of the top orthopaedic research scientists in the world, is a professor in the subject, and he wrote the definitive university textbook on analysing walking.
Me, well I know more about HTML than anyone else I know, but it’s such a finite subject that I no doubt share my expertise with millions of other people.
Although this pales in comparison to all above, I invented a language.
When I met my wife, she spoke Spanish and about four words of English, which was okay because I spoke English and about fifty words of Spanish. Additionally I am a non-native speaker of French. (ten years of study and BA in French literature)
I was determined to learn to speak to this girl and armed with only a few textbooks, a phrase book, three dictionaries and a verb book I was on my way. I would say things using Spanish words but generally French grammar or no grammar at all with insane word order (that made no sense) but she would always figure out what I was trying to say and repeat it when she wanted to say the same thing to me. As the years went by, my vocab and butchering of the Spanish language grew to a point that we were truly able to communicate with each other, but no one else could understand our “language.”
A few years later I took a Spanish I class, which was a real eye-opener for me. I have since learned standard Spanish but to this day primarily speak our own special language with my wife. It’s quite funny when I will be speaking to my wife on the cell phone and passersby will sometimes scratch their heads saying “That SOUNDS kind of like Spanish but what is it?”
