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Great read, thanks. To my mind, a clever person is someone who can help open up understanding of the worth of mathematics to someone who is not already particularly clever and comfortable with the subject. A genius is not necessarily a good teacher or influencer.

I don’t feel qualified to make any specific suggestion, but wondered if you or any of your followers have read “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter, which I still think of regularly when thinking about solutions to problems, and the way we think about them, intertwining art and music (one of my passions) in equal volumes.

https://amzn.eu/d/iusM3Zn

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Jul 5, 2023·edited Jul 5, 2023

I offer you George Herbert Fowler: zoologist, oceanographer, historian, archivist, competitive skier and misogynist. His early career was as a zoologist and marine biologist. He taught at University College London, founding the Challenger Society for Marine Science in 1903. In 1909 he retired while still only in his late 40s and moved to Bedfordshire, where he was elected to Bedfordshire Country Council. He became concerned that the historic records held by the council were not being properly cared for and set himself the task of organising and preserving them. He founded the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society in 1912, followed by the Bedfordshire Record Office in 1913. This was the first county record office in the country and all the other early county archives were founded by his trainees or under his influence. He wasn’t just a pioneer in the field, he invented it. He developed conservation techniques and wrote The Care of County Muniments, which was the archivists’ Bible for decades. While working to preserve the records, he also transcribed, translated and published many medieval records relating to Bedfordshire. His accuracy both in the translations and unravelling complex genealogies was unrivalled.

During the First World War he entered into government service as an oceanographer and meteorologist, and was rewarded with a CBE in 1918. After the war he returned to the Record Office and his historical pursuits. In his spare time he’s was a keen participant in winter sports and a champion skier. His personal life was unsatisfactory. He married a woman doctor - one of the early female trainees at the Edinburgh Medical School - and the marriage, for whatever reason, did not work out. She left him, and he developed a reputation for disliking women. He died in 1940.

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That's a new name for me - thank you! (I guess five good things out of six in the headline summary isn't bad)

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What a fantastic post!

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Enrico Fermi would be top of my list

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Not sure if Fermi counts as obscure or not these days (agree he's certainly smart enough to be on the list)! I guess we might have to wait and see until after the Oppenheimer movie?

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Wasn’t Thomas Young regarded as the cleverest man of his time? Hieroglyphs, wave theory of light, biology of vision, and musical theory.

I think he deserves wider recognition

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Wasn't a name I was particularly familiar with, but that looks like quite the range of talents, yes - though I don't know if having a recent biography rules him out? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everything

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