Stories of brilliant minds
Short, true and surprising. Myths busted, records nobody broke, and the people behind them.
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More stories · page 3
The Youngest Chess Champions of All Time
Grandmasters at 12, world champions at 18: how chess became the sport where children overthrow kings.
3 min read
The Only 5 People Ever to Win Two Nobel Prizes
More than 900 individuals have won a Nobel Prize. Exactly five have done it twice.
3 min read
The 12 Youngest Nobel Laureates in History
From a 17-year-old schoolgirl to a father-and-son physics team, these are the youngest people ever to win the world’s most famous prize.
3 min read
10 Child Prodigies Who Grew Into Legendary Geniuses
Most prodigies burn bright and vanish. These ten kept their promise — and changed music, mathematics, art and chess forever.
3 min read
The Most Prolific Composers in History, Counted Work by Work
One man wrote more than 3,000 pieces. Another wrote 600 songs before dying at 31. The astonishing arithmetic of classical music’s hardest workers.
3 min readThe Curie Family: Five Nobel Prizes, One Household
No family in history has come close to the Curies’ haul of Nobel medals — won across two generations, in three different disciplines.
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The Oldest Minds Ever to Win a Nobel Prize
Genius has no retirement age: the laureates who took the call from Stockholm in their late eighties and nineties.
3 min read
What History's Greatest Minds Understood About Money, Time, and Compounding
Benjamin Franklin grew a fortune from beyond the grave. Isaac Newton — arguably the smartest man alive — lost his to a bubble. The difference was not intelligence.
9 min readThe Greatest Investing Minds in History: When Genius Meets the Market
From Benjamin Graham to Jim Simons, meet the genius minds who decoded markets — and the one trait of temperament that separated them from everyone else.
6 min read
Mary Anning: How a Lyme Regis Cliffside Rewrote Prehistory
Born 21 May 1799 — the working-class woman who corrected Cuvier and rewrote the history of life on Earth.
8 min read
Alan Guth shares $1 million Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
Remembering Alan Turing: from codebreaking to AI, Turing made the world what it is today
What Alan Turing means to us
Aage N. Bohr Banquet speech
Does Essence Precede Existence? A Look at Camus's Metaphysical Rebellion
The Rebel Hero: Albert Camus and the Search for Meaning Amidst the Absurd
St. Albert the Great: Saintly Scientist for the Modern World
Albrecht Dürer: The painter with 'a magical touch'
Albrecht Durer's Peasant Engravings
Albrecht Dürer may not have written Lament on Luther, finds study
Albrecht von Haller on academies and the advancement of science: the case of Göttingen
Albrecht von Haller – Father of Modern Physiology
Wallenstein: The Enigma of the Thirty Years War
