List of autodidacts

--68.203.197.182 (talk) 06:23, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

This is a list of notable autodidacts which includes people who have been partially or wholly self-taught. Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning.

This article is horrifically short of female names. I count one. I'll add several: "Grandma Moses" was a self taught American folk artist who started painting in her seventies (?). Marie Curie(France and Poland) was self-taught, and so good that her husband abandoned his research in favor of hers, despite the fact that as a woman, for many years she could not get funding, or even an office, never mind a lab. She holds two Nobel Prizes, in different fields (Chemistry and Physics, I believe), and her daughter another one.

A fair number of early women astronomers, including quite famous ones with numerous important discoveries to their credit, were self-taught, because women weren't given access to equipment (especially telescope time and cameras, research assistants, money, or quality jobs in the field), but also because their discoveries were usurped with impunity by their male "colleagues."

Most women doctors and lawyers were largely self-taught and sat independently for examinations, since they were banned from all but a handful of professional schools after 1909 or so, and could only get a license in a handful of US states.

Also, nearly all famous women writers prior to 1900 (writing in English), we could start with Jane Austen.

SORRY, I don't have time to look up the more famous names in any if these fields, perhaps someone else could jump in.

Historical education levels

Main article: Autodidacticism § Historical education levels

Because of the large increase in years of education since 1800, especially during the early 20th century, it is difficult to define autodidactism and to compare autodidacts during different time periods.

Artists and authors

• Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist, and writer. However, Leonardo was not autodidactic in his study of the arts, as he was trained through the Guild system, just as other Renaissance artists had been.
• Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer, essayist, and poet. Winner of the Jerusalem Prize.
• José Saramago, Nobel Prize for Literature. His parents were unable to pay for his studies at early age, and he was forced to abandon the baccalaureate. At the age of 13, he began to study mechanics to repair cars. He continued the next thirty years working as a locksmith for a metal company, and in an agency of social services. His first novel (Terra de pecado) was published in 1947 without any success at all. He stopped writing for publication, although he continued doing manuscripts for himself. At the end of the 1960s, he joined the Communist party, and after the fall of the Fascist dictatorship in Portugal of 1974, he was the director of the nationalized newspaper Diario de Noticias. Just a few years after the putsch of the left wing failed in 1975, he began to write again to survive. In that point of his life, the fame came. In 1998 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• Rabindranath Tagore Nobel Prize of Literature. A Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

• The English visionary artist and poet William Blake was an autodidact. He was initially educated by his mother prior to his enrollment in drawing classes but never received any formal schooling. Instead, he read widely on subjects of his own choosing.

• John Clare was self-taught and rose out of poverty to become an acclaimed poet.

• Forensic facial reconstruction artist Frank Bender was self-taught. His well-known forensic career started off with a day trip to a morgue, asked to try to put a face on the deceased, brought measurements home, created a successful facial reconstruction that led to his first (of many) IDs. He took only one semester of sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

• Howard Phillips Lovecraft, weird fiction writer and primogenitor of modern horror fiction, was a self-taught writer, critic and commentator. A pronounced child prodigy by the time he was of primary school age, reading memorized verse not long after learning how to walk, and composing and writing his own poetry by the time he was six. Growing up, Lovecraft attended school only in brief stints, his ill-health ending all scholastic endeavors prematurely. During this time Lovecraft read constantly, gifted with an abnormal talent for reading comprehension. Some of his favorite subjects were astronomy and chemistry, about both of which he went on to write amateur pieces of commentary and criticism. Not long after developing a great interest in the pulp magazines of his day, he began writing fiction himself- eventually becoming a preeminent writer of weird fiction in the pulp press, his work appearing in magazines such as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories.

• Maxim Gorky was a self-taught man who rose out of poverty to become a world famous writer.

• Nazeer Naji, a top Pakistani Urdu news columnist and intellectual best known for his progressive writings has never attended any formal school because of the abject poverty of his parents. He has been in journalism for 50 years, started many popular magazines including Akhbar-e-Jehan and also served as the speech writer for the former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

• Feodor Chaliapin

• Terry Pratchett, a writer of science fiction, fantasy and children's books, is quoted as saying "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did."

• Herman Melville, a writer best known for Moby Dick engaged in self-directed learning through his life in literature, aesthetics, criticism and art.

• Playwright August Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade but continued to educate himself by spending long hours reading at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library.

• Playwright George Bernard Shaw left formal education while still in his mid-teens to become a clerk at an estate firm. He compared schools to prison and said that "I did not learn anything at school."

• Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist and short story writer, was primarily self-educated after high school. "... he read for hours at a time in bed", recounted his sister Marcelline. "He read everything around the house--all the books, all the magazines, even the A.M.A. Journals from Dad's office downstairs. Ernie also took out great numbers of books from the public library." His father wanted him to go to Oberlin for college, but Hemingway decided to become a reporter for the Kansas City Star.

• Louis L'Amour, an author who left his home at the age of 15 to expand his horizons and worked many jobs while educating himself.

• J.A. Rogers, the Jamaican-American author, was able to educate himself after only receiving a few years worth of primary education in Jamaica. He attended but never completed high school. While he was able to study commercial art at the Chicago Art Institute later in life, he got most of his knowledge in libraries and was able to produce many books based on race, history, sociology, and anthropology. He also mastered other languages such as Spanish, German, and French.

• Ray Bradbury, author of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery novels, graduated from high school but did not attend college. In regard to his education, Bradbury was quoted as saying:

Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

• Rudolph Dirks, one of the earliest and most noted comic strip artists, was an autodidact. He sold his first cartoon to a local newspaper when he was 13. For a while, he mainly designed ads. 17 years old, he sold cartoons to magazines like Life und Judge. With jobs like cover images for pulp novels he made his living until the New York Journal hired him, where he earned fame as creator of The Katzenjammer Kids.

• Alan Moore, creator of the graphic novels V for Vendetta and Watchmen.

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Actors, musicians, and other artists

• The 20th century virtuoso pianist Claudio Arrau was highly regarded as an intellectual despite his lack of formal education outside his musical training. Arrau spoke five languages, four of which he learned on his own in addition to his native Spanish: English, German, French, and Italian.

• The musician Frank Zappa was noted for his exhortation, "Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read."

• Kishore Kumar, Indian singer.

• Arnold Schoenberg called himself an "autodidact" in an interview. Other largely self-taught composers include notably Danny Elfman, Havergal Brian, Nobuo Uematsu, Joachim Raff, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Bohuslav Martinů, Georg Philipp Telemann and Edward Elgar.

• Many successful filmmakers did not attend or dropped out of college and/or film school. These include Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Dario Argento, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson.
• Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krichman taught himself cinematography through reading technical magazines, books and watching films.

• TV's Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS, who first rose to fame in America as Nigel Wick on The Drew Carey Show, quit high school in native Scotland at the minimum legal age to do so, 16. He continued his education, "haphazard and informal", through American, European and Russian literature, and in his autobiography, "American on Purpose", identifies himself as an autodidact—although a dilettante one (see the article on Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea).

• Penn Jillette, a member of the comedy and magic duo Penn & Teller, declared both he and his partner Teller to be autodidacts in an episode of their television series, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

• Keith Moon, the drummer for the rock band The Who. Widely considered one of the greatest drummers of all time. The only training he ever received was at 16 years old when he had 3 or 4 drum lessons with Carlo Little (an early member of the Rolling Stones), who was also a self-taught drummer.

• Christopher Hughes, the winner of Mastermind, International Mastermind, Brain of Britain, and a current member of crack TV quiz team the Eggheads is almost entirely self-educated. After leaving Enfield Grammar School at 15 he spent all his life working on the railways in the capacity of driver or station master. He is one of only four people ever to have won both Mastermind and Brain of Britain. On a couple of occasions on "Eggheads" he has referred to himself as "The Autodidact's Autodidact".

• Modern Pashto poet Ameer Hamza Shinwari though not educated in the regular manner, was able to establish his career through self-education.

• Robert Lewis Shayon, early radio producer, author, television critic for Christian Science Monitor and The Saturday Review, and Ivy League professor, never had a college education.

• David Bowie, singer, musician, multi-instrumentalist, actor, and painter, has never trained in any of the mentioned fields and only received a few singing lessons in the 1960s (as reported by his former manager, Ken Pitt). As a teenager he took some lessons on saxophone by Ronnie Ross. All other instruments (including piano, keyboards/synths, electric/acoustic guitar, harmonica, koto, limited bass, and percussion), he taught himself. His paintings and sculptures were created (and exhibited) without any formal art school training. He took a few lessons in movement and dance with the Lindsey Kemps Dance company but trained himself in mime.

• Jimi Hendrix, was guitarist and singer-songwriter, considered by some to be the greatest electric guitarist in music history.

• Noel Gallagher, singer, musician, multi-instrumentalist. At the age of thirteen, Noel received six months probation for theft from a corner shop. It was during this period of probation, with little else to do, that Noel first began to teach himself to play a guitar his father had left him, imitating his favourite songs from the radio.

• Andy DiGelsomina, composer and lead guitarist of the rock opera Lyraka. When asked in an interview whether he'd taught himself music composition DiGelsomina replied "Yes. I first taught myself the music reading, harmony, and fugue basics, then found myself especially motivated to read full orchestral scores because of (Richard) Wagner."

• Charles G. Dawes, was a self-taught pianist and composer and a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music. His 1912 composition, "Melody in A Major", became a well-known piano and violin piece, and was played at many official functions as his signature tune. It was transformed into the pop song, "It's All In The Game", in 1951 when Carl Sigman added lyrics.

• Errol Flynn

• Django Reinhardt, was a pioneering virtuoso jazz guitarist.

• Guitarist and composer Jeff Loomis (known from the band Nevermore) is a self-taught guitarist. He has stated in interviews that he took few lessons in his youth but "didn't do much".

• Hip-hop legend Nasir Jones, better known as Nas, dropped out of school at seventh grade. Born and raised in the Queensbridge Houses in Queens, New York City, Nas is self-taught in all the major academic areas of history, philosophy, science, math, English.

• Hip-hop superstar Marshall Mathers AKA Eminem, dropped out of high school at age 17 and had to repeat ninth grade multiple times. He has gone on record as saying that his ability at ryhming comes from his love of books and reading dictionary front to back multiple times.

• Noël Coward, was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer.

• Paul Gray, bassist, co-founder and songwriter for the Grammy-award winning band Slipknot stated "I am self-taught, never took any lessons".

• Russell Crowe saved up to go acting school at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney but by the time he had saved enough by working acting gigs he was told he already was practicing what was taught, and he would only develop bad habits.

Architects

• Architects' Alliance of Ireland is a group of long-established self-trained architects defending the rights of self-trained architects in the Republic of Ireland.
• Eileen Gray (August 9, 1878 – October 31, 1976) was an Irish furniture designer and architect and a pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture.
• Francis Barry Byrne (19 December 1883 – 18 December 1967) was initially a member of the group of architects known as the Prairie School. After the demise of the Prairie School about 1914-16, Byrne continued as a successful architect by developing his own personal style.
• Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 projects, which resulted in more than 500 completed works.
• Gustave Eiffel (December 15, 1832 – December 27, 1923) was a French structural engineer from the "École Centrale Paris", an architect, an entrepreneur and a specialist of metallic structures.
• Iannis Xenakis (Greek: Ιωάννης Ιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was an ethnic Greek, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer.
• Jacque Fresco (born March 13, 1916), is a self-educated Architectural Designer, social engineer, industrial designer, author, lecturer, futurist, inventor, and the creator of The Venus Project.
• Jean Prouvé (8 April 1901 - 23 March 1984) was a French metal worker and designer. His main achievement was transferring manufacturing technology from industry to architecture, without losing aesthetic qualities.
• Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965), was a Swiss architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modernist architecture or the International style.
• Léon Krier (born 7 April 1946 in Luxembourg), is an architect, architectural theorist and urban planner. From the late 1970s onwards Krier has been one of the most influential neo-traditional architects and planners, being one of the first and most prominent critics of architectural modernism.
• Louis Sullivan (September 3, 1856 – April 14, 1924) was an American architect, and has been called the "father of modernism." He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to and addressed by his surname, Mies, by his colleagues, students, writers, and others.
• Luis Barragán (Guadalajara, March 9, 1902 – Mexico City, November 22, 1988) is considered the most important Mexican architect of the 20th century and was self-trained.
• Michael Scott (24 June 1905 – 24 January 1989) was an Irish architect whose buildings included the Busáras building in Dublin, the Abbey Theatre, and Tullamore Hospital.
• Peter Behrens (April 14, 1868 – February 27, 1940) was a German architect and designer.
• Tadao Ando (安藤 忠雄, Andō Tadao?, born September 13, 1941, in Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorized as critical regionalism.
• Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was a French architect and theorist, famous for his "restorations" of medieval buildings.

Engineers and inventors

• John Smeaton, who was the first civil engineer.
• James Watt, the mechanical engineer who improved the steam engine, was "largely self taught."
• Oliver Evans trained as a millwright, inventor of the high pressure steam engine (independently of Richard Trevithick and with a more practical engine). Evans developed and patented the first known automated materials handling system.
• Thomas Alva Edison
• The Wright Brothers, especially Wilbur Wright. Though both brothers never graduated high school, Wilbur had completed all the course requirements, but his family moved to Ohio in 1885 before his graduation. Both brothers were mechanically inclined, with Orville running his own printing press in his teens. They entered the bicycle business as a team in 1892, selling existing models and creating their own brand, the Van Cleve, named after a relative. Wilbur made the first inroads in seriously studying aeronautics and the development of the world's first successful airplane.
• John Harrison, a carpenter by education, built the first marine chronometers enabling navigators to determine a ship's longitudinal position.
• R. G. LeTourneau, prolific inventor of earthmoving machinery.
• Granville T. Woods, an inventor in electrical and mechanical engineering with more than 50 patents, only went to school until he was ten years old. Learning on the job, he began as a blacksmith’s apprentice and continued as a machinist, an electrician, a railroad fireman, a locomotive and steamship engineer. In his free time, he kept reading, especially on the subjects of electricity and mechanics. During the 1860s and 1870s, because he was black, he was not allowed to borrow books from the local libraries so he would ask white friends to borrow them for him. Every time he saw a new piece of technology, he would ask questions about it. Years later, in a 1886 cross-examination for a patent dispute, he said that he was self-taught.

Scientists, historians, and educators

• Nathaniel Bowditch, a colonial period American mathematician who wrote the American Practical Navigator.

• Philosopher Daniel Dennett has described himself an autodidact. While he holds a PhD in philosophy, he says he has been a "beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest [him], from some of the world's leading scientists."

• Michael Faraday, the chemist and physicist. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew little of higher mathematics, such as calculus, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. Some historians of science refer to him as the best experimentalist in the history of science.

• Physicist and Judo expert Moshe Feldenkrais developed an autodidactic method of self-improvement based on his own experience with self-directed learning in physiology and neurology. He was motivated by his own crippling knee injury.

• Benjamin Franklin

• Buckminster Fuller, a self-proclaimed comprehensive anticipatory design scientist, was twice expelled from Harvard and, after a life-altering experience while on the edge of suicide, dedicated his life to working in the service of humanity and thinking for himself. In the process he created many new terms such as "ephemeralization", "dymaxion", and "Spaceship Earth".

• British electrical engineer, physicist, and mathematician Oliver Heaviside.

• "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley, a 19th-century British scientist.

• Jane Jacobs wrote books about city planning, economics, and sociology with only a high school degree and training in journalism and sternography, plus courses at Columbia University's extension school.

• Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant, built the most powerful microscopes of his time and used them to make biological discoveries.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a mathematical autodidact.

• John Forbes Nash, Jr. was a mathematical autodidact during his years at Princeton. In a Beautiful Mind, it is stated that he taught himself mathematics without the use of textbooks or courses but rather through his own inventive mind. He was known to only attend classes on days of tests and finals. Nash's most notable accomplishment was his discovery of Nash Equilibrium, one of the fundamental pillars in game theory.

• Karl Marx, the German socialist philosopher, was self-taught in economics, during his study in London, at the British Library.

• The cognitive scientist Walter Pitts was an autodidact. He taught himself mathematical logic, psychology, and neuroscience. He was one of the scientists who laid the foundations of cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.

• Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was largely self-taught in mathematics. Ramanujan is notable as an autodidact for having developed thousands of new mathematical theorems despite having no formal education in mathematics, contributing substantially to the analytical theory of numbers, elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.

• Vincent J. Schaefer, who discovered the principle of cloud seeding, was schooled to 10th grade when asked by parents to help with family income. He continued his informal education by reading, participation in free lectures by scientists and exploring nature through year-round outdoor activity.

• Heinrich Schliemann, German businessman and archeologist.

• The social philosopher Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century British scientist.

• The natural historians Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) and Henry Walter Bates both 19th-century British scientists.

• Gerda Alexander, Heinrich Jacoby, and a number of other 20th-century European innovators worked out methods of self-development that stressed intelligent sensitivity and awareness.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, artificial intelligence researcher.

• Eric Hoffer

• William Kamkwamba, inventor

• George Green, mathematician and physicist

• Robert Franklin Stroud, ornithologist while imprisoned

• James Marcus Bach, software testing expert

Others

• Kató Lomb, one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, spoke more than ten languages fluently and she learned them by gleaning their rules and vocabulary from books (mostly novels), as she described in her book Polyglot: How I Learn Languages (2008), originally published in Hungarian in four editions (1970, 1972, 1990, 1995).

• The German mystic and theologian Jakob Böhme was an autodidact. While being apprenticed to become a shoemaker, he read the Bible as well as the works of philosophers and theologians including Paracelsus, Caspar Schwenckfeld, and Valentin Weigel, thereby educating himself without any formal schooling.

• Professional skateboarder and entrepreneur Rodney Mullen established his reputation in the sport of freestyle skateboarding while young with new tricks and routines developed largely in isolation on his family's farm in Florida. His autodidactism led to significant and long-standing innovations in skateboarding, such as the flatground ollie and the kickflip, both staples of modern skateboarding.

• Sean Parker Internet entrepreneur and former President of Facebook, Inc. As of 2010, his net worth is nearly 2 billion USD.

• Frederick Douglass an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman, minister and reformer. He was and is one of the most renowned figures in United States history.

• Malcolm X, a one-time Black Muslim minister who late in his shortened life rejected that philosophy and became an adherent of the Sunni Islam branch of Islam, public speaker, and human rights activist, taught himself about subjects from genetics to sociology to philosophy. He also copied a dictionary word-for-word while in prison for 7 years, thus expanding his vocabulary himself.

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was kept from school by his mother who thought it would "inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn."

• Abraham Lincoln American President

• Heston Blumenthal Chef, author and TV presenter

• Adolf Hitler Nazi Chancellor of Germany; was self-educated beyond early education through libraries (primarily in Vienna and parts of Austria).

• Henry Knox, American Revolutionary War General and commander of continental artillery. Knox had been an owner of a book store before the war, and had taught himself the principles of period artillery out of his own general interest.

• J.B. Fuqua, American businessmen and philanthropist, who in his youth studied business practices from books sent to his farm by mail from Duke University library. The Fuqua School of Business, one of the top business schools in the United States, is named in his honor.

• Paul Keating, Former Australian Treasurer & Prime Minister. Keating left school at 15 years of age and was elected to Parliament when he was 25 years old. Keating is credited with opening up Australia's economy by bringing in various microeconomic reforms as Treasurer and setting up APEC's annual leaders meetings, perusing Aboriginal reconciliation and forging closer ties with Australia's near Asian neighbors whilst Prime Minister.

See also

• Autodidacticism