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Edison's ghosts the untold weirdness of history's greatest geniuses

"Overturn everything you knew about history's greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known. As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a gen...

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Main Author: Spalding, Katie (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2023.
Edition: First edition.
Subjects:
Eccentrics and eccentricities > Anecdotes.
Gifted persons > Anecdotes.
Genius > Anecdotes.
Anecdotes.
Biographies.
Humor.
Summary: "Overturn everything you knew about history's greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known. As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius - but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." So begins Katie Spalding's spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there's probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn't. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition."--Amazon.com.
Physical Description: 342 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-332) and index.
ISBN: 9780316529525
0316529524
Author Notes: Katie Spalding spent ten years of her life studying maths, which is just about the upper limit on how much maths you can do before people start actively avoiding you at parties. She was awarded her PhD in 2018 for a thesis titled "Growth and Geometry in Multi-Valued Dynamics", which is a particularly mathematical way of saying she drew a lot of pictures and pointed at them while saying "look, see?" and hoping nobody asked any follow-up questions.



After leaving the world of academia, Katie worked at IFLScience where she mixed scientific explanation and news with humor to an audience of hundreds of thousands. She has supplied research for the TV show QI and its sister podcast No Such Thing As A Fish; her articles have also been seen in HuffPost, PoliticsMeansPolitics and the Maths in Schools journal, among others.

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