One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cradlesofeminenc0000goer_l9f8/pa...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181207045746/https://www.maa.o...
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a one-man discovery (or has more of a chance to become one) than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
The mechanism for which Higgs was awarded was also independently discovered by at least ten other people (I can't count)
>The Higgs mechanism is therefore also called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism,[9] Anderson–Higgs mechanism,[10] Anderson–Higgs–Kibble mechanism,[11] Higgs–Kibble mechanism by Abdus Salam[12] and ABEGHHK'tH mechanism (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
Can't wait for OpenAI to get the nobel prize; Swedes are more sympathetic than mathematicians!! (so that human beings might completely separate discovery from reward/awards/recognition. Discovery is a human right!!!)
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.
See also my older comment for more resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976697