(Mods, please feel free to move this thread to a more appropriate forum. I wasn’t sure where to put it.)
I am intrigued by people who have contributed great things to math and science yet received little or no formal education in those fields.
A few that come to mind:
Michael Faraday. One of the greatest experimenters ever. Yet his knowledge in math didn’t extend above basic algebra.
Marjorie Rice. A housewife who came up with new discoveries in geometrical tiling.
Milton Humason. I love this story… when the Mount Wilson Observatory was being built 100 years ago, Milton was a mule driver and was hired to haul materials and equipment up the mountain. He hung around the observatory after it was completed and eventually became an astronomer.
What are some others?
Seems this was somewhat more common in the past. Is it essentially unheard of today?
Vivien Thomas, a black man who lost his life savings in the 1929 crash and therefore could not attend college, who nonetheless was a pioneer in the development of open heart surgery.
Hedy Lamarr is known for her inventions (used to this day in cell phone technology), yet seems to have had minimal formal education in the sciences, having gone to acting school.
I suspect the great increase in knowledge and specialization in the time since Faraday make it difficult to make a contribution without training. You still can in things like tiling, which you could do without a detailed background in mathematics, but I can’t see someone making a development in electromagnetism today without studying it.
For what it’s worth, I was surprised to learn that my uncle, who worked for Merck and got a couple of patents while working there, had no formal degree in chemistry. He got those a few decades ago, so it certainly was possible even that recently to make a contribution in chemistry.
Nicholas Christofilos Nicholas Christofilos - Wikipedia - a Greek businessman (he owned an elevator company) who studied physics on his own, and eventually was hired at Lawrence Livermore as a physicist.
Oliver Heaviside was too poor to attend college so became a telegraph operator. From this lowly start he went on to become one of the most important electrical engineers ever and made important contributions to mathematical physics.
What a coincidence! Just this morning I read a review (in American Scientist) of a biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) by Tamara Plakins Thornton. At age 12 with only three years of formal schooling, he apprenticed at a ship chandlery owned by a relative and that was the end of his formal education. He reorganized the accounting at his company, taught himself algebra (and eventually calculus), revised the standard nautical charts and produced his own, then got interested in actuarial math and worked for an insurance company. Somehow he got placed on the board of governors at Harvard, where he engineered the removal of an incompetent president. Later on he got interested in celestial mechanics and eventually translated four of the five volumes of Laplace’s famous tome (his translation of the fourth was posthumous). Along the way he was elected to the Royal Societies of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
One other instance I have written about before. A friend in graduate school who was a HS dropout, never went to college, taught himself undergrad math, somehow got into grad school and got master’s and PhD. He didn’t ever do that much math, but the story is remarkable.
My favorite is George McJunkin. Born a slave, be became a cowboy after the Civil War, and his observance and curiosity led to the discovery of the important difference between the dating of Folsom and Clovis point arrow-heads.
I think Maria Mitchell taught herself celestial mechanics by reading texts in the original French and Latin. She went on to be an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory and then a professor of astronomy at Vassar.
Note that Ramanujan spent a while studying math at various universities. He didn’t even try much at his other subjects, and he was kicked out of each of those institutions. Everyone knew how good he was at math and (when he bothered to try) other academic subjects from at least the age of 10 on. He was allowed to study math by himself. By the time he was 23, there were other Indian mathematicians trying to find him a position doing mathematical research. They also began trying to get British mathematicians to allow him to come to work with them. When he was 26 he went to Cambridge University to work with G. H. Hardy. When he was 31, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (and then he died a year later). It was not true, as some stories of his life imply, that his abilities were unrecognized before he wrote to Hardy.
One story I’m fond of is that of Britney Gallivan, who, while still in high school, completely settled the problem of how many times a piece of paper can be folded. She first of all recognized that the oft-quoted figure of a maximum of seven folds had no basis, then recognized what the actual limiting factors were, then derived a model for such folding and a formula based on it, and then applied the formula she had derived to actually do the experiment and folded a single piece of paper in half twelve times.
I have no idea what she went on to do after high school, and the problem she solved was not a fundamental one with widespread implications, but still, it’s impressive to see any single person so thoroughly own every aspect of a problem.
Trades-HS degrees in Chemistry or Quality Control are pretty recent in much of Europe; most of the lab techs I’ve met had a high school degree (college-track or trades) but at most that meant three years of completely-theoretical chemistry beyond the middle school introductory courses.
When half the managers in a certain Swedish factory got fired, the new Quality manager was a guy who hadn’t even finished HS but had been the senior lab tech for over a decade; he wouldn’t have been able to explain acidity models or resonance but if you needed someone to take a look at a recipe for a water-based latex and tell you what was wrong with it, he was your man.
Jane Goodall had no formal education as a scientist. She couldn’t afford a university education, so at the age of 18 she got a job as a secretary at Oxford. In 1957 she took a trip to Africa, where she met Louis Leakey. He hired her as an assistant, and in a few years she was off by herself studying chimpanzees.
Since I’ve been watching the TV show, how about the sex researcher Virginia Johnson? She had some college but never received a degree, but she did fundamental and important research.