Geniuses have been around for a very long time. In fact, perhaps the oldest identifiable genius is the Egyptian Imhotep, the architect who built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara sometime before 2600 B.C.E.

Within a few generations, his architectural design evolved into the Great Pyramid of Giza, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that survives to the present day.

Moreover, it is difficult to imagine the history of world civilization without the contributions of specific geniuses. Within the confines of the West, for example, just think of:

• Greece without Aristotle and Alexander the Great
• Italy without Dante and Michelangelo
• Spain without Cervantes and Goya
• France without Descartes and Napoleon
• Germany without Goethe and Beethoven
• the Netherlands without Rembrandt and Vermeer
• England without Shakespeare and Newton
• the United States without Jefferson and Whitman
• Russia without Tolstoy and Lenin

Each culture would suffer a major loss, not just in prestige or influence but in recognizable identity besides. An English literature without Shakespeare's plays and poems would be like a London without the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, or Big Ben.

Rather than conceive of the impact of geniuses in terms of national heritage, we can contemplate their significance with respect to particular domains of human achievement. Where would philosophy be without Plato, mathematics without Euclid, astronomy without Copernicus, physics without Einstein, chemistry without Lavoisier, biology without Darwin, medicine without Pasteur, art without Picasso, technology without Edison, or film without Bergman? Rather different, no?

Given the prominence of geniuses throughout the world's history, it should not surprise us that they have often become the subjects of biographers. Examples include Diogenes Laertius's The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, written in the early 200s C.E., and Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, published in about 1550. These biographies obviously focus on creative geniuses.

Yet other biographers have concentrated on exemplars of genius in other domains, such as politics and war. Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written around 100 C.E., is a case in point. And almost two centuries earlier there appeared the biographies included in Sima Qian's (Ssu˘ma Ch'ien) Records of the Grand Historian, the classic history of early Chinese civilization.

These biographical contributions are all substantial. They often provide the only information we have about the geniuses they describe. But these biographies are humanistic — literary and historical — rather than scientific. They certainly are not examples of psychological science.

Genuine scientific inquiries into the psychology of genius came much later. Indeed, such investigations did not appear until the 19th century. The investigators engaged in these inquiries adopted two main approaches: psychometrics and historiometrics (Simonton, 1999c). 💡

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Next: Psychometric studies of genius

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Copyright ©2009 Dean Keith Simonton. Reprinted with permission of Springer Publishing Company www.springerpub.com.

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