Idea Makers

Worthy of your attention

Published in

From the Diaries of John Henry

8 min readOct 21, 2016

I recently had the pleasure of reading a new release from the desk of Stephen Wolfram — Idea Makers. The book is structured as a collection of biographical blog posts about scientific luminaries and notables from the fields of the author’s interest including physics, computer science, and mathematics. It is a good rule of thumb to filter one’s reading material based on the Lindy effect — any book that is still talked about 10 years after publishing may only then known to be worth picking up. I recommend the works of this author as an exception to the rule, for the problem with relying on the Lindy effect for selection of reading material is that one may miss out on modern transformational works (which A New Kind of Science certainly was).

As would be expected for biographical works, the subjects in question are selected for their extraordinary contributions to their field. It is common for people of exception to get placed on a pedestal. I imagine the desire for recognition — the wish for a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize — serves a useful function as an incentive to motivate those who toil and sacrifice in relative obscurity for the generally thankless, challenging, and lets face mostly underpaid fields of research and discovery. For those few who do climb the mountain of contribution, a very different life may await. Celebrity worship, the tendency for the crowd to grant special attention or affection to those of accomplishment or notoriety, has a certain network effect about it. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, and it is thus the case that those who get the most attention may not always deserve it.

The value of a book like Idea Makers is that it allows you to turn your focus to those of accomplishment who truly deserve your precious currency of attention, for their efforts have improved our lives probably more than we know. We live in an age where the heroes around us (both real and artificial) are surprisingly accessible, unfortunately to the point where they may drown out those more potentially meaningful connections with our peers. Through new channels of media we suddenly find unfettered real time access to the thoughts or promotions of the elite draining the hours of our day. Presidential candidates roll out their own online news network for 24/7 dissemination of vitriol and propaganda of demagoguery. Artists and authors manage facebook communities with their own branded echo chambers of adoration. And then there’s my personal favorite, the twitter “micro-blog” elite, where so little is said so much and staccato blurbs and barbs are traded as if they were or could even ever be true debate. The value of social media, that of making connections and firming ties, is greatly diminished as our feeds are encroached by celebrity. The problem with filling your twitter feed with these “thought leader” giants of >10,000 followers is that your potential for dialogue is effectively zero. The goal should be to build a community of those you admire who have not gone mainstream so that you can actually share meaningful dialogue. This problem of identifying potential connections not just of similar interests or adjacent networks but who may actually have desire to interact is one that neither twitter or facebook has put enough effort to solving.

Ravel — À La Manière De Chabrier by André Laplante

The scientists covered in Idea Makers each had their own mountain to climb, and along the way made some impact on our world far beyond that of any celebrity, recognition by the public or otherwise. Richard Feynman probably achieved the most recognition of those discussed here, for in his public talks (often transformed into successful books) he won the hearts of the general public through irreverent anecdotes and lessons, provided leaderships in fields such as Quantum Electrodynamics and Computer Science, paved the way for new fields still being explored today such as nanotechnology or quantum computation, taught physics to whole generations of new students through his introductory lectures, and of course found his one fundamental discovery of path integral formulation of quantum mechanics along the way.

Drawing by the artist Ofey, a contemporary of Feynman

Feynman’s celebrity was the result of and perhaps (depending on your view) reward for his work as a physicist. For some others the mantle of recognition may be thrust on them not by their own achievements but instead by circumstance. Ada Lovelace was born into notoriety as the child of the famed poet Lord Byron.

Oh, nature’s noblest gift, my grey goose quill, Slave of my thoughts, obedient to my will, Torn from the parent bird to form a pen, That mighty instrument of little men. — Lord Byron

One can’t help but wonder how the public’s eye may have shaped her path. In her journey to becoming the first computer programmer, one can almost imagine a motivation to escape her father’s legacy present in her collaboration with Babbage, for what could be more divergent than the path of a technical writer documenting Babbage’s difference engine. And yet it is fitting that it was through her own quill that she managed to create a legacy of her own, perhaps more like her father than even she envisioned. For in her transformation of the notes of Babbage into prose more digestible for the greater public there surely must have been an element of poetry or at least word-smithery at play. I find it fitting that computer programming was thus born from the hand of not an engineer but instead a technical writer — one who would later go on to be CEO. In the tradition of Hofstader’s Gödel Escher Bach, it was in the synthesis of the art of poetry in her technical writing and the mechanics of the engineer that the unique voice of a programer was born (for at their best poetry and technical writing are both the clearest forms of communication), and today the name of Lovelace is primarily known for Ada, not for Byron.

There are some idea makers who in their lifetime never receive their deserved attention, Srinivasa Ramanujan was one. As a self taught mathematician his knowledge base and methods of practice were quite different than his contemporaries. Living in poverty and obscurity, he was only discovered by the power of his pen, in this case the letters he shared to seemingly random professors coupled with pages from his notebooks of work. These notebooks were a true treasure and even today are still being dissected for the hidden truths that they contain. In the words of Wolfram: “Ramanujan was surely a great human calculator, and impressive at knowing whether a particular mathematical fact for relation was actually true. But his greatest skill was, I think, something in a sense more mysterious: an uncanny ability to tell what was significant, and what might be deduced from it.” I think it fair to say that in this gift there was a certain element of the artist’s intuition at play.

It would be easy to assign the idea makers in this book labels like “genius” or the like, but I notice the author never does. I suspect he’s probably had his share of people throw praise of that nature his way, but is fortunate enough to have visibility of the full community of the thinking class to see that there may be more scientists of this caliber in practice than the public realizes. For every Alan Turing that is eventually brought forward and celebrated in the public there must be at least a few more working behind the curtain of obscurity, perhaps with some local recognition of their peers but little else in the way of public knowledge. That is not to say the extent of intelligence and talent of those profiled here are not extraordinary, but perhaps there was a little good fortune at play at times — having the right background or being in the right place at the right time for their discoveries — for science and discovery must certainly fall at a point on the luck-skill continuum just like any other game. I think it is entirely possibly that many of us may even cross paths with some of these more obscure idea makers from time to time — the passing hello as we cross the street, the shared meal in the cafeteria, the speakers in a conference session, the joint spectators of a coding competition — we’ll never really know just who we really have crossed paths with without doing a little biographical investigation of our own. In the end it is certainly a mistake to focus all of our attention on those who reach the notoriety of achievement, for then we lose out on the more accessible connections of our peers and contemporaries.