Genius: Standing on the Shoulders of Social Networks

Abstract

This chapter critically situates the idea of "genius." The very idea of genius is based on and reinforces the myth of individualism and the "I" as a grammatical illusion. As a sociologist, I claim that if you give me a genius, I will give you a social network. I illustrate this claim with brief looks into non-Euclidean geometry, Ramanujan, Nikola Tesla, and Rodin followed by an exploration of the Einstein genius cluster. Other topics include chaos and creativity, the social context of genius, intuition, and an appendix on creativity and madness. I examine the key notions of genius clusters and the multiples idea: any given innovative idea or technology appears along with more or less similar innovations-families of innovations or parts thereof-at the same time within the boundaries of a cultural or civilizational region.