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58 GENIUSES

Self-Taught Geniuses and Autodidacts

Most documented geniuses had elite educations. A rare few — Ramanujan, Faraday, Lincoln — built world-class minds from scratch with borrowed books.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

IQ 160

Synonym for genius and one of humanity greatest scientific minds

Alma Deutscher

Alma Deutscher

Is an English composer, pianist and violinist who completed a short opera The Sweeper of Dreams at age 7.

Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture.

Avicenna

Avicenna

IQ 180

A Medieval Persian polymath, physician and philosopher

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

IQ 180

Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist known for writing Man and Superman (1902

Bill Gates

Bill Gates

IQ 160

An American business magnate, software developer, and philanthropist. The co-founder of Microsoft Corporation.

Charlemagne

Charlemagne

IQ 180

The King of the Franks, the King of the Lombards, and the Emperor of the Romans who united the majority of western and c

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

IQ 165

An English writer and social critic.

Daniil Dubov

Daniil Dubov

Is a Russian chess grandmaster.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk

IQ 155

One in a lifetime entrepreneur, business giant, scientist & engineer. The man behind Tesla, Space-X and more.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

An Austrian-born American composer and conductor who became one of the most important and influential composers in Holly

George Green

George Green

IQ 180

British mathematical physicist who was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism.

Hugh Miller

Hugh Miller

IQ 155

A self-taught Scottish geologist and writer, folklorist and an evangelical Christian.

James Croll

James Croll

A Scottish scientist who developed a theory of climate variability based on changes in the Earth's orbit

Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci

IQ 200

Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who is widely considered one of the greatest minds and painters of all time

Marnen Laibow-Koser

Marnen Laibow-Koser

IQ 268

Is a genius with a proclaimed IQ of 268, who started studying and playing music at the age of 3 and is a multi-instrumen

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday

IQ 175

An English scientist whose main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism an

Richard G. Rosner

Richard G. Rosner

IQ 192

Is a writer and a TV personality from the US with an IQ of 192

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

IQ 170

American author and humorist, often called The Father of American Literature

Sophie Germain

Sophie Germain

A French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

IQ 160

American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison

IQ 185

An American inventor and businessman who has been described as America's greatest inventor.

Walter O'Brien (Obrien)

Walter O'Brien (Obrien)

IQ 197

An Irish businessman & information technologist

Brielle Milla

Brielle Milla

IQ 160

Child prodigy which today works mainly with chemistry

Stephen Wiltshire

Stephen Wiltshire

IQ 52

A British architectural artist and autistic savant

Flo and Kay Lyman

Flo and Kay Lyman


Their Memory
World's only female autistic savant twins

André Masséna

André Masséna

A French military commander during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.

Jason Padgett

Jason Padgett

An American mathematical genius, who acquired his skills after an accident.

Leslie Lemke

Leslie Lemke

IQ 58

Leslie Lemke is a genius American musician who can perfectly play any music piece he had heard despite suffering from ce

Vitalik Buterin

Vitalik Buterin

IQ 200

The Father of Ethereum

L. L. Zamenhof

L. L. Zamenhof

Visionary creator of Esperanto, promoting global understanding

Alan Watts

Alan Watts

IQ 145

A British writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audien

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

IQ 180

Is one of the greatest English poets and the foremost poet of the early 18th century.

Anaximenes of Miletus

Anaximenes of Miletus

An Ancient Greek, Ionian Pre-Socratic philosopher.

André-Marie Ampère

André-Marie Ampère

IQ 180

A French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

IQ 175

A Dutch businessman and scientist in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology.

Caroline Herschel

Caroline Herschel

Being the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist and to hold a government position in England.

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage

IQ 170

A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer.

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus

IQ 140

An explorer and navigator from Genoa (now part of Italy) who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, opening t

Christopher Langan

Christopher Langan

IQ 174

An American autodidact described as "the smartest man in America"

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe

IQ 165

An English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.

Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi

IQ 190

An Italian physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He is considered as the a

Epicurus

Epicurus

IQ 185

An ancient Greek philosopher and sage who founded the philosophical school of Epicureanism and openly allowed women and

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

IQ 180

An Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics durin

George Boole

George Boole

IQ 175

A largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician who layed the foundations for the information age

Henry Thomas Buckle

Henry Thomas Buckle

IQ 175

An English historian, the author of an unfinished History of Civilization considered to be the Father of Scientific Hist

Heraclitus

Heraclitus

IQ 185

An Ancient Greek, pre-Socratic, Ionian philosopher best known for his work On Nature.

Jean-François Champollion

Jean-François Champollion

IQ 175

A French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding

Mary Somerville

Mary Somerville

IQ 180

A Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath who played a crucial role in the women's rights movement in the United Kingdo

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn

IQ 165

A German-Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the Haskalah, the 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen

Nodirbek Abdusattorov

Nodirbek Abdusattorov

Uzbek chess player

Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside

IQ 180

An English mathematician and physicist who brought complex numbers to circuit analysis, invented a new technique for sol

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Pierre-Simon Laplace

IQ 195

A French scholar and polymath whose work was important to the development of engineering, mathematics, statistics, physi

Richard Bentley

Richard Bentley

IQ 170

An English classical scholar, critic, and theologian considered the "founder of historical philology",

Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley

IQ 170

An English biologist and anthropologist known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolu

Wright brothers

Wright brothers

IQ 165

Two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful moto

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

IQ 154

An American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third President o

Akiane Kramarik

Akiane Kramarik

An American poet and painter who started drawing at the age of four.

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よくある質問

What is an autodidact?

An autodidact is a person who teaches themselves a field of knowledge without formal instruction.

Who is the greatest self-taught genius?

Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician who independently rediscovered centuries of number theory, is the most extraordinary self-taught genius in history.

Was Einstein self-taught?

Einstein was formally educated but credited independent reading of Euclid, Kant, and Helmholtz at age 12 for his mathematical intuition.

Did Lincoln go to college?

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal schooling — he taught himself law, rhetoric, and history from borrowed books.

Can you become a genius by self-teaching?

Expertise (10,000-hour rule) is achievable through self-teaching; raw intellectual ability is largely heritable — but unusual combinations of both produce exceptional self-taught thinkers.