who were the greatest scientist/poets?
My votes go to Oppenheimer, who read the Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit, and opened the Atomic Age with deep poetic symbolism (Trinity from John Dunne's Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for example.)
and
Omar Khayyam who defined the Persian calendar for a millennium and linked algebra and geometry together in fundamental ways, while writing enough quatrains to form the Rubáiyát.
Very open if others have suggestions!
https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0714-oppenheimer-literature
"Poetry was ever-present in Oppenheimer’s letter writing and in his reactions to current events. We know that, according to the book "American Prometheus," by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, before the Trinity test, late at night in the base camp mess hall, Oppenheimer sipped coffee, rolled smokes and read French poet Charles Baudelaire."
"Oppenheimer is not Krishna/Vishnu, not the terrible god, not the ‘destroyer of worlds’ — he is Arjuna, the human prince! He is the one who didn’t really want to kill his brothers, his fellow people. But he has been enjoined to battle by something bigger than himself — physics, fission, the atomic bomb, World War II, what have you — and only at the moment when it truly reveals its nature, the Trinity test, does he fully see why he, a man who hates war, is compelled to battle. It is the bomb that is here for destruction. Oppenheimer is merely the man who is witnessing it.”
Everything about this note is interesting
If into because I really don’t know much about any of the people, or their work, that is mentioned
Amazing what one actually doesn’t know… our default should be of no knowledge, rather than the opposite “know-it-all” type lens
Some reading ahead…
Glad to spark some curiosity!
Though many of Omar Khayyam's quatrains may not come from him - a lesson on how history and literature intersect.
John von Neumann [1] is certainly up there among the greats. His list of contributions to math, physics, and computer science is so long I won’t bother writing here but to name a few, he:
- formalized the math of quantum mechanics
- invented game theory
- invented cellular automata
- proposed the von Neumann architecture that powers today’s computers
- first to axiomatically define a Hilbert space
- first proposed quantum logic
- invented the Monte Carlo method
- invented the first pseudorandom number generator
- first to describe the technological singularity
I recommend reading “The Man from the Future” if you want to learn more.
Just realized you’re referring to scientists who were also poets 😅
Awesome on the reading list!
Feynman 100%.
