I never understood why this story got so much attention. Perhaps it is remarkable for a high school student, but the math is trivial and I’m sure the calculation had been done thousands of times before by people who never accepted the easily debunked theory that there is a fixed limit. One of my colleagues did the calculation in a few idle moments when I was in graduate school. He then did the experiment with some especially thin and large pieces of paper. That was years before Britney was born.
People who made significant contributions to math/science yet received no education in those fields.
Srinivasa Ramanujanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
Did any of them publish it (for any definition of “publish”)?
John Harrison
John Harrison was a self-educated English carpenter and clockmaker
His wooden turret clock for Brocklesby Park, built in the 1720s still operates.
He then turned his attention to the one of the greatest problems of the age, calculating longitude at sea, and solved it with his invention of the marine chronometer.
Thomas Edison - a home-schooled telegrapher. Who became one of the most successful American inventors.
On a napkin, as I recall.
Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto (he did earn degrees after his discovery).
Yeah, but it’s not like Pluto was a real planet or anything…
Just read the thread title as “People who made significant contributions to meth science”.
I was going to say I’m pretty sure none of them received education in that field, then I remembered a college acquaintance who used his organic chemistry skills to brew up methamphetamine.
Faraday may not have had much formal education, but he was plenty educated - he attended lots of Royal Society lectures and served as an apprentice of sorts to Humphry Davy for years.
That’s true of many of the people mentioned above, that even though they were not formally educated that they had studied the subject in great detail.
E.E. Barnard (1857-1923) made several important discoveries in astronomy, despite having little formal education of any kind.
Thomas was played by actor/rapper Mos Def (opposite the late Alan Rickman) in the movie Something the Lord Made. It is an excellent film and Mos Def gives an outstanding performance.
John Baird John Logie Baird - Wikipedia
Never finished college.
[The following excerpt may be enjoyed for the fluidity, suggestiveness, exuberance and the many more-or-less accurate references to discrete components and design of the technology in the late 1930s. It from a scene in Finnegans Wake where customers in an Irish bar watch a television show:]
…the bairdboard bombardment screen, if tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes, glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite, damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines. Shlossh! A gaspel truce leaks out over the caeseine coatings. Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope…
On 5 December 1960, four-month-old Theo Dahl was severely injured when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. For a time, he suffered from hydrocephalus and, as a result, his father author Roald Dahl (who only had a high school education) became involved in the development of what became known as the “Wade-Dahl-Till” (or WDT) valve, a device to alleviate the condition. The valve was a collaboration between Dahl, hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade and London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, and was used successfully on almost 3,000 children around the world.
Microbiologist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the subject of a Google Doodle last month. He had no formal scientific background, but had a monopoly on cool discoveries because he wouldn’t tell anyone how he made his microscope lenses.
While there are instances in the past of Dopers accusing me - offline - of being a John Logie Baird partisan, I’m not quite sure this works as an example. Baird did have exposure to a technical education significantly beyond secondary school level (which I’d guess was minimal at the Larchfield of the period).
Baird is a sort of parallel with Faraday or Ramanujan. Someone who, without having accumulated formal certificates or a thorough education in the field in question, had actually been exposed to a good chunk of the current understanding.
[but did you like the Joyce? ;)]
ETA: I wasn’t sure of the normal style when referring to him–I’m taking from your post that the “Logie” is generally used (like the “Harvey” of Lee Oswald)?
And, while we’re at it, how is it pronounced?
Wikipedia’s got an entire list of amateur mathematicians. Many of the people on that list are still living, so I wouldn’t say that amateurs making significant mathematical contributions is “essentially unheard of today”.