10 Self-Taught Geniuses Who Outshone the Schools

The most subversive fact in the history of genius is how much of it never went to school. The people below had, between them, almost no formal  education — and they rewrote physics,  mathematics, biology and art while the credentialed world caught up.

1. Michael Faraday

A blacksmith's son apprenticed to a London bookbinder, he educated himself by reading the  books he bound. A ticket to Humphry Davy's lectures — and the beautifully bound notes he sent Davy afterwards — got him a lab assistant's job. He became the greatest experimentalist in history: electromagnetic induction, the electric motor and generator, field theory. He twice declined a knighthood and, by well-attested account, declined the presidency of the Royal Society, preferring to remain "plain Michael Faraday."

2. Srinivasa Ramanujan

His mathematical education was substantially one book — Carr's Synopsis of five thousand theorems, absorbed as a teenager in Madras. From it he reconstructed and then far surpassed a century of European mathematics, alone. His notebooks still yield publishable results today.

3. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

A Delft cloth merchant with no university, no Latin and no scientific contacts ground lenses of obsessive quality and became the first human to see bacteria, protozoa and sperm cells. The Royal Society initially doubted him, sent observers, and ended up publishing him for fifty years.

4. Mary Anning

A carpenter's daughter who sold fossils to feed her family found, at twelve, the first complete ichthyosaur known to science, and later the first plesiosaurs. Barred as a woman from the Geological Society, she watched gentlemen scientists publish her finds; today those skeletons anchor London's Natural History Museum and her name anchors the history of palaeontology.

5. Frederick Douglass

Taught the alphabet in secret as an enslaved child, he traded bread for reading lessons with white schoolboys in Baltimore. The self-taught reader became the nineteenth century's greatest American orator and the most photographed American of his era — deliberately so, using the new medium against caricature.

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

— Frederick Douglass

6. George Boole

A cobbler's son who left school at sixteen, taught himself mathematics while running a school to support his parents — and invented the algebra of logic. Every processor on Earth now runs on Boolean operations; he never held a degree.

7. Oliver Heaviside

Deaf from childhood, formally educated to sixteen, he reformulated Maxwell's twenty equations into the four everyone now learns, co-invented modern circuit analysis and predicted the ionosphere layer that bears his name — much of it done in a Devon cottage, in poverty.

8. William Herschel

A professional oboist and organist who taught himself astronomy and telescope-making in middle age, then found Uranus in 1781 — the first planet discovered in recorded history. His sister Caroline Herschel, another autodidact, became the first woman paid for scientific work in Britain.

9. George Green

A Nottingham miller with one year of schooling who, in 1828, self-published an essay inventing potential theory — mathematics now central to physics. Fifty-two people bought it. Green's theorem is taught to every engineering student alive.

10. Grandma Moses

No training at all, first serious canvas around 78 — and by her death at 101 she was among the most famous painters in America, a cornerstone of our story on late-blooming masters.

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Watch: How Michael Faraday Changed the World with a Magnet | Great Minds

What they had instead of school

Reading these lives together, the common inheritance is obvious: obsessive reading, manual skill, and freedom from the fashionable errors of their era's classrooms. The academies eventually embraced every person on this list — after the work was done.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the most famous self-taught scientist?

Michael Faraday, the bookbinder's apprentice who became history's greatest experimental physicist without any university education.

What book taught Ramanujan mathematics?

G.S. Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics — an out-of-date exam cram book from which he reconstructed and surpassed a century of mathematics.

Did Mary Anning ever receive scientific recognition?

Barred from the Geological Society as a woman, she received little formal credit in life; today she is celebrated as a founder of palaeontology.