The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley Read Free Page A

professor of psychology at the University of California–Davis and a self-confessed intellectual spelunker. He loves nothing more than exploring unknown depths, places where others fear to go, owing to the darkness and the loneliness. In that sense, too, he reminds me of Galton. Also, like Galton, Simonton is obsessed with the study of genius and has a serious numbers addiction. (“How are your differential equations?” he asks me at one point. Not so good, how are yours?)
    Unlike Galton, though, Simonton does not stick pins into pieces of felt and is perfectly capable of eye contact and other basic social niceties. Unlike Galton, he does not hail from a privileged background. His family was blue-collar, his father a high school dropout. And, crucially, unlike Galton, Simonton does not suffer from an ethnocentric bias. He sees the world clearly, and he is onto something big.
    Simonton’s obsession, like most, began early. In kindergarten, his family bought a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. He was instantly enthralled. He would spend hours gazing at the photos of Einstein and Darwin and other geniuses the way other kids gawk at photos of baseball players and pop stars. Even at that age, he was fascinated not only by the achievements of these godlike men and women, but the way their lives intersected in unexpected ways. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo squabbling on the streets of Florence. Freud and Einstein kibitzing over coffee in Berlin.
    In college, Simonton took a course on the history of civilization, but ever the scientist, his papers were peppered with mathematical equations—“fame is directly proportional to the occurrence of name; that is F = n(N) ”—and references to the laws of thermodynamics. His professor was nonplussed and wrote a stern rebuke: “If you think of the historical process as rigidly as universal laws are conceived of, then you will probably have great difficulty understanding history.” Simonton has spent the last fifty years proving that professor wrong. He earned a PhD in psychology and devoted himself to the embryonic field of “geniusology.”
    It hasn’t been easy. Academia, for all its professions of broad-mindedness, doesn’t take kindly to troublemakers. This was the 1960s and ’70s, a time when creativity and genius were not subjects the academy took seriously, which seems odd, given that universities are supposedly in the business of producing geniuses, but less odd when you consider that, as the author Robert Grudin so astutely observed, “there are two types of subjects that a culture studies little: those which it despises and those which it holds dearest.” The subject of genius manages to fit both types. We hold dear the notion of the solitary creator, courageously overcoming the odds, vanquishing the confederacy of dunces allied against her. Yet we secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) despise the know-it-all, especially one with dangerous new ideas.
    “When I told people of my plans to study genius, they thought I was nuts,” Simonton tells me. “They actually gave me a list of the academic journals that I would not be published in.” Simonton, by his own account a stubborn man, was determined to prove them wrong.
    Over the past half century, he has pioneered the obscure but fascinating field of historiometrics. It’s the study of past epochs using the tools of modern social science, mainly statistics. Historiometrics is a kind of psychological autopsy, only the postmortem is performed not on a single individual but on an entire society. It isn’t interested in the usual history, though. It cares little for wars and assassinations and sundry disasters. No, the field is interested in the bright spots of history, the epochs that spawned beautiful art and brilliant philosophy and scientific breakthroughs.
    Early in his career, Simonton homed in on a phenomenon central to the field of historiometrics: the appearance of genius fluctuates over place and