by Joseph Broadworth

Created on: August 22, 2010   Last Updated: August 25, 2010

     In the mild spring of 1653 a boy slowly trundled across the short pastures of Lincolnshire, England. He had been sent by his stepfather to collect the cows and guide them in for milking. An hour passed. Another hour passed and the frustrated man cursed and started towards the pastures himself. In the distance he saw his stepson standing on the small wooden bridge that spanned the small creek on the property. He approached the boy and noticed that he was staring simply down into the water, a fixated, distant look on his young face. The boy never noticed the man was there. The man was angry but also curious, so he didn't raise his voice when he asked "Isaac, I told you to bring the herd in. What on earth are you doing?" The boy slowly turned, looking confused at this interruption. "Sorry, sir. I was watching the patterns of the water. I think I can explain them, the currents and eddies." So it was at a young age that Issac Newton realized that he was not cut out for the pastoral life. And when we today consider Newton to be one of the most influential men ever born and one of the world's supreme geniuses, this maybe apocryphal anecdote aptly displays our appreciation of the concept of brilliance and what we mean by using the term. In discussing the fine line between genius and insanity I will use Newton as a template, although this analysis will be far from scholarly and definitive.

     Isaac Newton was not an easy man to get along with. A natural loner, he could be seen sometimes wandering the pristine grounds of Cambridge University, where he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position that Stephen Hawking held until recently. By all accounts he gave a hideous lecture, as none of his students could understand what he was talking about. On one occasion he entered his lecture room to speak and found that no students had shown up, to which he just shrugged and went home to work on some problem that captured his attention. His contemporary colleagues, however, were in awe of his intellect. One afternoon Edmund Halley (who had just figured out the periodicity of the comet that now bears his name) called on Newton to ask him if he could explain mathematically the known paths of the planets in relation to the Sun, to which Newton replied that he had already wrote down his equations months before and scrambled amongst his papers to retrieve them. Newton was unable to find the correct papers and told Halley (one of

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