In Einstein’s first years in the patent office he was working on his PhD thesis, which when completed in 1905 was still one of his first publications. I’ve read Pais’s biography and it left me with the impression that his career up to that point was unusually independent, with some trouble jumping through the hoops of his day, but not extraordinarily so. They didn’t have the NSF back then funding all the science grad students.
I agree that all the people we’re discussing were brought into the system (the others less so than Einstein) and that Einstein had to overcome negative selection even while some professors thought he showed promise of doing great things. (Becoming an insider then isn’t guaranteed—in the previous century there was Hermann Grassman trying to get out of teaching high school all his life.)
Heaviside and Ramanujan accomplished less than Einstein, but they started way further outside.
In Einstein’s first years in the patent office he was working on his PhD thesis, which when completed in 1905 was still one of his first publications. I’ve read Pais’s biography and it left me with the impression that his career up to that point was unusually independent, with some trouble jumping through the hoops of his day, but not extraordinarily so. They didn’t have the NSF back then funding all the science grad students.
I agree that all the people we’re discussing were brought into the system (the others less so than Einstein) and that Einstein had to overcome negative selection even while some professors thought he showed promise of doing great things. (Becoming an insider then isn’t guaranteed—in the previous century there was Hermann Grassman trying to get out of teaching high school all his life.)
Heaviside and Ramanujan accomplished less than Einstein, but they started way further outside.