Interesting observation.
Guess what the following people have in common?
I'll offer the board a clue - they are referred to as autodidacts which is exactly what Grant Gordon & Calvin Wallen are.
Engineers and inventors
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist, and writer. However, Leonardo was not autodidactic in his study of the arts, as he was trained through the Guild system, just as other Renaissance artists had been.
John Smeaton, who was the first civil engineer.
James Watt, the mechanical engineer who improved the steam engine, was "largely self taught."
Oliver Evans trained as a millwright, inventor of the high pressure steam engine (independently of Richard Trevithick and with a more practical engine). Evans developed and patented the first known automated materials handling system.
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman, who has been described as America's greatest inventor. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
Nikola Tesla, electrical engineer and inventor best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system never graduated from university.[36]
The Wright Brothers, especially Wilbur Wright. Neither brother graduated high school. Wilbur in fact had completed all the course requirements, but his family moved to Ohio in 1885 before graduation. Both brothers were mechanically inclined, with Orville running his own printing press in his teens. They entered the bicycle business as a team in 1892, selling existing models and creating their own brand, the Van Cleve, named after a relative. Wilbur made the first inroads in seriously studying aeronautics and the development of the world's first successful airplane.
John Harrison, a carpenter by education, built the first marine chronometers enabling navigators to determine a ship's longitudinal position.
R. G. LeTourneau, prolific inventor of earthmoving machinery.
Granville T. Woods, an inventor in electrical and mechanical engineering with more than 50 patents, only went to school until he was ten years old. Learning on the job, he began as a blacksmith's apprentice and continued as a machinist, an electrician, a railroad fireman, a locomotive and steamship engineer. In his free time, he kept reading, especially on the subjects of electricity and mechanics. During the 1860s and 1870s, because he was black, he was not allowed to borrow books from the local libraries so he would ask white friends to borrow them for him. Every time he saw a new piece of technology, he would ask questions about it. Years later, in an 1886 cross-examination for a patent dispute, he said that he was self-taught.[37][38]
Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, a Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory, who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. He was not admitted to elementary schools because of his hearing problem, so he was self-taught.
Yuri Kondratyuk, a Ukrainian and Soviet engineer, pioneer of space exploration, rocketry and astronautics. He did not receive formal education because of persecution by Bolsheviks, forcing him to permanently change his identity to protect himself.
Henry Ford, billionaire founder of Ford Motor Company. Did not attend college.[39]
Susan Fowler, American writer and software engineer who was home-schooled at a young age and subsequently taught herself mathematics and physics before being accepted into a university.[40]
Oliver Heaviside who was an electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist, developed mathematical techniques to solve differential equations, expressed Maxwell's equations in vector notation, and made significant contributions to transmission line theory. He had no formal education beyond his sixteenth year.
Alicia Boole Stott, was an Irish-English mathematician. Despite never holding an academic position, she made a number of valuable contributions to the mathematical field, receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen
Scientists, historians, and educators[edit]
Melanie Klein, the founding mother of children's psychology
Francis Edgeworth, was a self-taught economist.
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory.
Blaise Pascal, was a mathematician, philosopher, physicist and inventor who was home-schooled.[41]
Nathaniel Bowditch, a colonial period American mathematician who wrote the American Practical Navigator.
Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, chemist, discoverer of several elements, pioneer in the field of spectroscopy
Galileo Galilei, astronomer, engineer, mathematician and physicist. Dropped out of college.
Michael Faraday, the chemist and physicist. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew little of higher mathematics, such as calculus, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. Some historians[42] of science refer to him as the best experimentalist in the history of science.
Physicist and Judo expert Moshe Feldenkrais developed an autodidactic method of self-improvement based on his own experience with self-directed learning in physiology and neurology. He was motivated by his own crippling knee injury.[citation needed]
George Boole was a largely self-taught mathematician, philosopher and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854) which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age.
Mary Everest Boole known for introducing mathematics as fun for children. Mother of Alicia Boole Stott.
André-Marie Ampère was a physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". He is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid (a term coined by him) and the electrical telegraph.
Benjamin Franklin
Buckminster Fuller, a self-proclaimed comprehensive anticipatory design scientist, was twice expelled from Harvard and, after a life-altering experience while on the edge of suicide, dedicated his life to working in the service of humanity and thinking for himself. In the process he created many new terms such as "ephemeralization", "dymaxion", and "Spaceship Earth".
"Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley, a 19th-century British scientist.
Jane Jacobs wrote books about city planning, economics, and sociology with only a high school degree and training in journalism and stenography, plus courses at Columbia University's extension school.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant, built the most powerful microscopes of his time and used them to make biological discoveries.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a mathematical autodidact.
Artemas Martin editor of the Mathematical Visitor in 1877 and of the Mathematical Magazine in 1882.
Karl Marx, the German communist philosopher, was self-taught in economics, during his study in London, at the British Library.
American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic, Lewis Mumford studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree.
Scientist and inventor Stanford R. Ovshinsky had no college education.
The cognitive scientist Walter Pitts was an autodidact. He taught himself mathematical logic, psychology, and neuroscience. He was one of the scientists who laid the foundations of cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.[citation needed]
Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was largely self-taught in mathematics. Ramanujan is notable as an autodidact for having developed thousands of new mathematical theorems despite having no formal education in mathematics, contributing substantially to the analytical theory of numbers, elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.[43]
Vincent J. Schaefer, who discovered the principle of cloud seeding, was schooled to 10th grade when asked by parents to help with family income. He continued his informal education by reading, participation in free lectures by scientists and exploring nature through year-round outdoor activity.
Heinrich Schliemann, German businessman and archeologist.
The social philosopher Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century British scientist.[citation needed]
The natural historians Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) and Henry Walter Bates both 19th-century British scientists.
Gerda Alexander, Heinrich Jacoby, and a number of other 20th-century European innovators worked out methods of self-development that stressed intelligent sensitivity and awareness.[citation needed]
Eliezer Yudkowsky, artificial intelligence researcher
Eric Hoffer, recipient of the National Medal of Freedom by President Reagan
William Kamkwamba, inventor
George Green, mathematician and physicist
Robert Franklin Stroud, ornithologist while imprisoned
James Marcus Bach, software testing expert
Steve Irwin, Australian herpetologist, conservationist, TV personality and general animal expert, never went to college and primarily learned everything he knew about biology and zoology from teaching himself and from his father.
Joseph Needham was originally schooled as a biochemist, but later in life became an autodidact sinologist. He edited and contributed to the enormous body of work known as Science and Civilisation in China.
Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov, Russian scientist
Clyde Tombaugh, American astronomer who discovered the Kuiper belt.
Benjamin West, American astronomer, mathematician, professor at Rhode Island College, and publisher of several series of North American almanacs.
Mary Anning, an amateur palaeontologist. Her findings contributed to important changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.
Caroline Herschel was an astronomer who discovered many comets.
Amos Tversky was a mathematical psychologist with no formal schooling in mathematics.
James Croll, FRS, 19th-century Scottish scientist.
George Smith Assyriologist who discovered and deciphered the Gilgamesh epic in 1872, without any university or other higher education.
Alan Watts, lecturer and writer in philosophy and religion at various colleges and institutes.
