She was my advisor as an undergrad. I think the world of her, but I don’t know that she’s necessarily a genius.
The ELMO Bumpy Torus was (is?) a plasma fusion experiment at Oak Ridge National Labs. Early fusion experiments were done in cylindrical chambers, but the plasma leaked out of the ends. Someone clever designed a chamber shaped like a donut (but torus sounds classier) - no ends for the plasma to leak out of. The ELMO group (which may or may not have been an acronym) did not stretch their tubular plasma device into one torus, they built a bunch of their devices and strung them into a torus. The ELMO devices were wider than the interconections, and that made the torus look bumpy.
BTW, limegreen, if your BIL was not in Tennessee, were his initials R.A.D.? A guy with those initials was listed as an author on all the papers from that group, but my fellow summer interns did not know why the “guy from California” was given that high honor. If your BIL is that guy, you’ve solved a 30 year old mystery for me. 
We now return to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress.
No, sorry, his name was Tom M. And I’m sure I didn’t listen very closely when he told us about his work. We were too busy begging him to take us to a movie, or sing to us. I loved that guy.
I agree. Also, after reading books on I.Q. tests I was able to raise my scores from around 135 up to the 170’s. Genius isn’t all its cracked up to be, in a certain sense.
I avoided homework in high school, excepting large projects, but never got below 99% on a test and sometimes I could argue with the teacher that they had made a mistake in framing a question and I was right after all, and get the 100%.
I developed a reputation as a “genius” legal brief writer as a paralegal.
I also have a reputation as a “genius” musician and songwriter.
But can I do amazing things in math? No. Fairly good at simple arithmetic in my head but I’m can’t do calculus for shit.
A person can be a genius in some areas and an idiot in others.
nevertheless, whatever I set out to do I nearly always succeed and where I fail it’s not because I wasn’t smart enough.
I know a guy who graduated from MIT, top of his class in law school, speaks 3 languages fluently, taught himself to play piano and guitar, active in local politics, and I don’t really know how to describe it but when you talk to him you can tell he’s thinking about 10 other things while still paying full attention to what you’re saying.
I also learned the hard way not to discuss football with him, because I swear he has every statistic from the past 30 years memorized, and also because he teases me mercilessly about being a Giants fan.
or else Nurture provides a context in which Nature’s potential is stymied and wasted. In society intellectually dominated by the likes of Gladwell, guess which is the more common outcome.
Many successful highly creative people have been known to have unpleasant, not-a-team-player personalities. Some were drug abusers, e.g. this article My romance with ADHD meds. mentions a mathematician who self-medicated with amphetamines to be able to focus on his work. (A not-so-medicated, not-so-successful case would be Ted Nelson who seems to have massively underperformed relative to the potential and value of his ideas simply because he couldn’t put in the effort to put them into practice or even to organize his friends/followers, which he seems to have had at some point, to do it for him).
Now, if even successful/prominent creative people have exhibited these qualities which aren’t good for career success in this day and age, what should we conclude about similar unsuccessful ones? How many such people have failed to live up to their useful potential because they don’t fit in well into the modern anti-intellectual society ran by not-so-creative people for whom reading Gladwell is a hobby?
Then again, at other times other sorts of talent may have gone to waste as well. E.g. today’s society gives natural born marksmen great potential for self-realization and professional success, thanks to the appropriate technology (quality rifles), institutional support (marines’ sniper school) and career opportunities (Western militaries fighting endless low intensity wars). Presumably in 18th century potential great snipers could not have made nearly as good a career out of this ability.
Sure - I think another point to Gladwell’s book - not that I am a big fan of his one way or another - is that, at any given time, there is a “crop” of folks who bear a variety of talents. For the most part, those folks go through life in much the same way as the rest of us (maybe with more problems because highly-intelligent folks can have problems fitting in) - some find ways to exploit their gifts, but many are stymied and wasted. Occasionally there is a convergence of factors which truly exploit a particular group of gifts in a certain location and period of time and voila, a declared genius emerges and changes the rules somehow.
Met and worked with plenty of scary smart guys, but no real geniuses - it’s a big word. I know of two guys, my PhD supervisor and a current younger colleague, who’s understanding of our field (organic chemistry) is essentially total, but they’re not geniuses and would laugh if you called them such.
It really all boils down to what is the mark of genius - a famously slippery concept. In science it certainly isn’t all about ‘smarts’, or knowledge. I was at a conference last week featuring two speakers who are on that could get a Nobel prize sort of level. Both of them are garden variety smart (relatively speaking), but share an intellectual fearlessness - they can both say with a straight face that they push back the boundaries. Total commitment to asking (and answering) big questions. It sounds so easy, yet so few of us manage to do it.
I’m more likely to consider students as having genius qualities, maybe because I’m distanced from them so things get distorted a little. I’ve seen one or two staggeringly good PhD students over the years, guys several levels above their contemporaries. They’re working under / with the PIs vision, though, so even with the best of them it’s a dice roll as to whether they can be a genius on their own.
My husband’s childhood bbf and our best man at our wedding is a genius. He is much to modest to ever agree, but he has two PhD’s ( before the age of 28) and is doing work that will one day probably win him a Nobel prize in Medicine.