Origins Of Genius

Author : Dean Keith Simonton
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195128796
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Origins of Genius written by Dean Keith Simonton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book applies Darwin's theory of natural selection to the creative process and takes readers inside the mind of genius. Line art.

Author : Darrin M. McMahon
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465069916
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Divine Fury written by Darrin M. McMahon and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genius. With hints of madness and mystery, moral license and visionary force, the word suggests an almost otherworldly power: the power to create, to divine the secrets of the universe, even to destroy. Yet the notion of genius has been diluted in recent times. Today, rock stars, football coaches, and entrepreneurs are labeled 'geniuses,' and the word is applied so widely that it has obscured the sense of special election and superhuman authority that long accompanied it. As acclaimed historian Darrin M. McMahon explains, the concept of genius has roots in antiquity, when men of prodigious insight were thought to possess -- or to be possessed by -- demons and gods. Adapted in the centuries that followed and applied to a variety of religious figures, including prophets, apostles, sorcerers, and saints, abiding notions of transcendent human power were invoked at the time of the Renaissance to explain the miraculous creativity of men like Leonardo and Michelangelo. Yet it was only in the eighteenth century that the genius was truly born, idolized as a new model of the highest human type. Assuming prominence in figures as varied as Newton and Napoleon, the modern genius emerged in tension with a growing belief in human equality. Contesting the notion that all are created equal, geniuses served to dramatize the exception of extraordinary individuals not governed by ordinary laws. The phenomenon of genius drew scientific scrutiny and extensive public commentary into the 20th century, but it also drew religious and political longings that could be abused. In the genius cult of the Nazis and the outpouring of reverence for the redemptive figure of Einstein, genius achieved both its apotheosis and its Armageddon. The first comprehensive history of this elusive concept, Divine Fury follows the fortunes of genius and geniuses through the ages down to the present day, showing how -- despite its many permutations and recent democratization -- genius remains a potent force in our lives, reflecting modern needs, hopes, and fears.

Author : David Alan Brown
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300072465
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Leonardo Da Vinci written by David Alan Brown and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Leonardo da Vinci's beginnings as an artist and his earliest works, including the Uffizi Annunciation and the Munich Madonna and Child

Author : Dean Keith Simonton
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521543699
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Creativity in Science written by Dean Keith Simonton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, historians - and even scientists themselves - have often tried to decipher the basis for creativity in science. Some have attributed creativity to a special logic, the so-called scientific method, whereas others have pointed to the inspirations of genius or to the inevitable workings of the zeitgeist. Finally, some have viewed scientific breakthroughs as the product of chance, as witnessed in the numerous episodes of serendipity. Too often these four alternative interpretations are seen as mutually exclusive. Yet the central thesis of this book is that the chance, logic, genius, and zeitgeist perspectives can be integrated into a single coherent theory of creativity in science. But for this integration to succeed, change must be elevated to the status of primary cause. Logic, genius and the zeitgeist still have significant roles to play but mainly operate insofar as they enhance, or constrain the operation of a chance combinatorial process.

Author : Dean Keith Simonton
Publisher : Guilford Press
ISBN 13 : 9780898622010
Total Pages : 518 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Greatness written by Dean Keith Simonton and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1994-05-21 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking work offers the first comprehensive examination of the important personalities and events that have influenced the course of history. It discusses whether people who go down in history are different from the rest of us and whether specific personality traits predispose certain people to become world leaders, movie stars, scientific geniuses, and athletes. It sheds light on the depth of potential in everyone, yielding important clues as to how we can take advantage of our own individual personality traits. Probing the lives of a range of important figures, the book explores the full range of phenomena associated with greatness, scrutinizing the significance of everything from genetic inheritance, intuition, aesthetic appreciation, and birth order, to formal education, sexual orientation, aging, IQ, and alcohol and drug abuse. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in the people and events that have helped shape the world, including mental health professionals and scholars studying psychological topics in the larger context of science, art, politics, and history. The book also serves as an engaging text for undergraduate psychology courses.

Author : Dean Keith Simonton
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262038110
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Genius Checklist written by Dean Keith Simonton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients. What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory. Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, firs-tborn; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks. Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. Genius is born and made, the domain of child prodigies and their elders. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses—and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!

Author : Adam Fisher
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1455559016
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Valley of Genius written by Adam Fisher and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the most important book on Silicon Valley I've read in two decades. It will take us all back to our roots in the counterculture, and will remind us of the true nature of the innovation process, before we tried to tame it with slogans and buzzwords." -- Po Bronson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift and Nurtureshock A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley -- from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Rarely has one economy asserted itself as swiftly--and as aggressively--as the entity we now know as Silicon Valley. Built with a seemingly permanent culture of reinvention, Silicon Valley does not fight change; it embraces it, and now powers the American economy and global innovation. So how did this omnipotent and ever-morphing place come to be? It was not by planning. It was, like many an empire before it, part luck, part timing, and part ambition. And part pure, unbridled genius... Drawing on over two hundred in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes readers from the dawn of the personal computer and the internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented. It interweaves accounts of invention and betrayal, overnight success and underground exploits, to tell the story of Silicon Valley like it has never been told before. Read it to discover the stories that Valley insiders tell each other: the tall tales that are all, improbably, true.

Author : Justin Martin
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0306818817
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Genius of Place written by Justin Martin and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.

Author : Norman Lebrecht
Publisher : Scribner
ISBN 13 : 1982134267
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Genius & Anxiety written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively chronicle of the years 1847­–1947—the century when the Jewish people changed how we see the world—is “[a] thrilling and tragic history…especially good on the ironies and chain-reaction intimacies that make a people and a past” (The Wall Street Journal). In a hundred-year period, a handful of men and women changed the world. Many of them are well known—Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich, no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus, no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin, genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber, there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth. What do these visionaries have in common? They all had Jewish origins. They all had a gift for thinking in wholly original, even earth-shattering ways. In 1847, the Jewish people made up less than 0.25% of the world’s population, and yet they saw what others could not. How? Why? Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent, beautifully designed volume is “an urgent and moving history” (The Spectator, UK) and a celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.

Author : Sean B. Carroll
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0307952347
Total Pages : 594 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Brave Genius written by Sean B. Carroll and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The never-before-told account of the intersection of some of the most insightful minds of the 20th century, and a fascinating look at how war, resistance, and friendship can catalyze genius. In the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis and ascended to prominent, dangerous roles. After the war and through twists of circumstance, they became friends, and through their passionate determination and rare talent they emerged as leading voices of modern literature and biology, each receiving the Nobel Prize in their respective fields. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished and unknown material gathered over several years of research, Brave Genius tells the story of how each man endured the most terrible episode of the twentieth century and then blossomed into extraordinarily creative and engaged individuals. It is a story of the transformation of ordinary lives into exceptional lives by extraordinary events--of courage in the face of overwhelming adversity, the flowering of creative genius, deep friendship, and of profound concern for and insight into the human condition.