Asymmetrical Information

LIVING poets, playwrights, etc.? I suppose the NEA has to support *someone*, but IMHO everything in the last 40 years has been total crap. I mean, just read it - objectively, by any measure, it's all crap. And don't get me started on architecture...

Wait, what is the name of the set I'm supposed to be listing people from?

Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Linus Torvalds, Quentin Tarantino, Nobuo Uematsu, Shigeru Miyamoto, Chris Anderson ...

Oh wait, he only wants me to list the people whose means of creativity will be validated by academia fifty years from now ... so they don't count.

Okay, "American", sorry, scratch the Japanese dudes from my sarcastic list.

Okay, okay, and Torvalds ...

The point is, I think some of the constraints on the question are arbitrary and only serve to give the answer he wants.

Anonymous, that's not quite true. Tom Stoppard is a genius, Carl Dennis is good enough to keep me awake at night, Peter Doig is a great painter, etc . . .

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia and raised in England (mostly) so he's really more British than American, which is what the question is asking for.

Dear God, has Sir Tom become an American?

Of course, this list assumes that classical music, etc. is more worthy of knowing than what appears on American Idol. Perhaps I'm just getting all east coast and hegemonic here.

Modern orchestral music is arguably less worth knowing about simply because few people pay attention to it -- it has virtually zero cultural influence. When future academics study 20th century music, they'll be studying the incredible explosion of influential new musical forms (jazz, blues, rock, R&B, hip-hop) not 20th century orchestral music. Similarly, they won't be studying 20th century stage productions, they'll be studying the birth and development of film whose cultural importance is orders of magnitude greater.

I can name a couple of playwrights (but only because they've been successful in film as well) and a couple poets and architects, but I'm really not a fan of the poetry and architecture of recent decades. No embarrassment or apologies from me.

Peter, Paul & Mary (a three fer!), Honus Wagner (an athletic, very distant cousin of my fav opera composer), Rush Limbaugh (*listening for those intense boos*), 'Jane Galt' (a not-very-famous social commenter), Jane Austen (a commenter of all things truly British), I. Jones (infamous canine-named archo-collector), M. Torke (one who truly 'gets the point') and I. Noguchi (a little short of 'alive' but still love his flowing lines).

Remember your Bugs Bunny! In the 1940's everyone got the joke about the long haired conductor or physicist. Later you could play even with Glenn Gould. Art and music no longer have the high brow push they used to. In science the stars are drastically suppressed, so it's not a fault to not know anyone. Partly that's due to the fact that the big guys don't write popular science books. Einstein wrote several, as did other physicists.

It might not be a bad idea to push a few as stars if you can control the egos a bit

You're right, I have no idea what I was thinking, except that Coast of Utopia was scalping for $500.

Poets: Carolyn Forche, Adrienne Rich, Robert Pinsky, Ted Kooser, Donald Hall. Scientists: Edward Witten, Sidney Brenner, David Mumford, Peter Shor, Steven Weinberg, Charles Fefferman, to mention a few. On the rest of categories, I can either only come up with names of people who may already have died or are foreign (e.g. Rawls, Habermas, Tom Stoppard, pianist Gavrilov, Yo-Yo Ma) or simply not quite adequate for the category proposed (Bobby McFerrin, Wynton Marsalis, Philip Glass), or else I plead complete ignorance!

Funny. I kinda felt as sarcastic as Person (#2). My list:

Poets:
Garrison Keillor
Peggy Noonan
Quentin Tarantino
Playwrights:
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Aaron Sorkin
Woody Allen
Painters: none
Sculptors: none
Architects:
Burt Rutan
John Carmack
Classical Musicians:
Billy Joel
Conductors:
John Williams
Composers:
Tracy W. Bush
Danny Elfman
Robin Miller
Randy Newman
Alan Silvestri
Glenn Stafford
Matt Uelmen
John Williams
Scientists:
Stephen Hawking
Tom Magliozzi
Chris Menzel
Benjamin Kuipers
Ephraim Armendariz
Social thinkers:
Walter Russell Meade
Christopher Hitchens
Jane Galt
Donald Sensing

The source of my derision: this fellow seemed to want us to name people who we look upon as we do historical figures of 500BC-1950AD, except that they have to still be alive.

It's as if I challenged you to name a plaid apple, and then called you ignorant if you couldn't.

"Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey."

"Especially" Dr. Alfred Kinsey? I'm sure the others in that sentence would feel honored by the mere juxtaposition.

The common thread throughout history is that self-appointed guardians of higher thought tend to be annoying.

And I'd bet anyone dollars-to-donuts that a young Mozart would have killed to get on 'American Idol'...

Yes, I can name more than one in every field, although limiting the list to Americans is really, really, parochial in this day and age. Before getting critical towards anyone who can't however, show me a living American architect, for instance, who has the equivalent of Falling Water or the Johnson Wax building on his resume, to say nothing of the prodigous output of Wright. I can't name too many American male tennis players right now, for the pedestrian reason that they kinda' suck, relative to a certain couple of non-American fellows.

"And I'd bet anyone dollars-to-donuts that a young Mozart would have killed to get on 'American Idol'..."

I can just imagine Simon Salieri calling his stuff rubbish.

The Chairman of the NEA is right. I find it unforgiveable that American artists, composers, musicians, playwrites etc. have done so poorly that I do not know their names. They should truly, truly be ashamed at the way they are letting down their culture.

To me, it's that "living" that's definitely the problem. I mean, I recognize all the names listed, and could add quite a few of my own -- of Americans alive fifty years ago. (Previewing my comment, I see that more people have pounded on this idea while I was writing it.)

I can name a couple of living American "classical" composers -- William Bolcolm, Michael Daughtery, and Peter Scheickle come to mind. (I'm probably spelled at least one of those wrong, but looking up the correct spelling seems like cheating in this context.)

But there's no one I'm aware of in the world today composing at the level of a Bernstein or Copland. And it seems rather rude for the NEA chairman to act as if that is my fault.

It gets even worse if you look at musical theatre composers -- in 1957 you've got Rogers, Lowe, Loesser, Bernstein, and Wilson, all not just living, but active and producing some of their best work. Today you've got Sondheim (seemingly well past his prime), Wildhorn (has he done anything in the last decade?), and that's all I can think of. Broadway is all foreign imports, revivals, and movies converted to musicals.

So...people who lived in an age when TV had 3 channels, the Internet did not exist, a goodly chunk of non-classical music was condemned for its improper racial origins, and jet travel had yet to be invented, knew more about other forms of entertainment, like plays, poetry, and the plastic arts?

Shocking. Next they'll tell us the womenfolk of 1957 did less needlepoint than those of 1857.

Actually, before being shocked, I'd like some evidence beyond "I suspect." Personally, I suspect the folks who worked as, say, farmhands and ditchdiggers might not have known much about Margret Mead, and I further suspect that the modern heirs to the urban self-styled sophisticates who celebrated Kinsley might do pretty well on this test.

Apples to apples, and all.

I'm guessing that 50 years ago, our common man would say "Arthur Miller? Yeah, that's that guy who married Marilyn Monroe, right?"

"Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey."

Quite apart from the fact that the inclusion of Pauling, Carson, and "especially" Kinsey (oops, "Dr." Kinsey--apparently he was the only one of these who was a PhD or physician) are liberal heroes, does the writer not realize the grievous scientific errors Pauling and Carson made?

It's funny, I don't feel at all embarrassed about my inability to satisfy the NEA chairman's criteria for being "cultured." To be fair, I don't really satisfy my own on several levels, but I feel ok about letting him down. If I'm more interested in French painting circa 1900 than American painting right now, is that a crime? That said, I have several friends who are in no way famous but who compose, draw, paint, write poetry, and engage in almost any artistic endeavor imaginable (I'm not sophisticated or talented, nor do I run with an elite crowd, I just happen to know a lot of talented people). Is that worse than knowing who the poet laureate of the U.S. is right now, or being intimately familiar with the work of whoever happens to be the darling of the art world right now? Just curious.

Conductors? I'm sorry, I don't know any of the true artists of our time: the f-n' conductors!

"I'm guessing that 50 years ago, our common man would say "Arthur Miller? Yeah, that's that guy who married Marilyn Monroe, right?"

Depends on whether the academic-official complex spends the next fifty years trying to ram him down our throats as a first-rate playwright. If they do, bet on people paying even less attention to the officially-approved arts then they do now.

Of course limiting question to Americans is parochial, but this is comign from the NEA after all. They have atleast some duty to promote national art.

What I find interesting though, is the number of times people replied, presumably unknowingly, with foreign-born answers. Hitchens and Hawking are both British, though they work in America. I asked some co-workers and we didn't bat an eye at Gehry or Barabasi or Caro (Canadian, Romanian and British). Does this ignorance of nation of origin mean we're more parochial for claiming them for ourselves, or less because we appreciate them without concern for where they were born?

Would the NEA chairman have considered Einstein an American? Von Braun? Teller? Bethe? Fermi? Practically the entire Manhattan Project was run by foreign-born scientists, and yet no one thinks of it as anything but an American project. A lot of those men won the National Medal of Science, and I'd assume the NSF and the NEA have about the same standard of "American-ness". (Sorry for all the scientists, but I'm not as familiar with foreign-born, American-residing, mid-20th-century artistic or literary figures.)

Even though I could name more than one in all the categories, it not because I find their works particularly worthwhile.

Indeed, I find myself agreeing with Njorl, for once. I think he hit it dead center.

...does the writer not realize the grievous scientific errors Pauling and Carson made?

Pauling was almost certainly the most important theoretician of chemistry of all time. The "grievous scientific errors" you're stacking against that are what, exactly?

What accountability does the NEA have in this? Couldn't one say that they've done a lousy job of promoting American arts and artists over the last several decades?

Defenses of the NEA always mention how they give grants not just to outre, "shocking" artists, but to grass roots, community-based artistic endeavors as well. But isn't it a failing of the NEA's mission if the only artists that ever enter the national consciousness are those who have offended someone enough to cause an outcry? Old ground, I know, but the art world seems to have let the last 40 years or so of media pass them by. Being written up in the Village Voice and New York Times isn't going to make you famous.

As for scientists, some of it has to do with the dearth of popular science writing, but more of it has to do with the collaborative nature of science these days. Very few ideas or discoveries can be easily attributed to one person, and most discoveries are taking place a the end of a chain of knowledge so long that it is difficult to describe the significance to anyone outside the field. (And as we know from newspaper reports, attempts to simplify things tend to leave you with exaggerated, over-hyped claims.)

Good catch on Hitchens and Hawking, Jared; as someone who named them, I'm all too ready to consider Hawking American, as America is where he hangs his hat. As for Hitchens, I kinda shoulda known better... meanwhile, your points about foreign-born scientists with achievements on American soil are well taken.

There's also notable scientists to me who are practically contemporaries, and only fail the list because they passed away relatively recently. For instance, Edsger Dijkstra (Dutch-born, taught at Texas, d. 2002); Richard Feynman (d. 1988); Carl Sagan (d. 1996); Isaac Asimov (Russian-born, d. 1992).

And there's two more foreign-born gentlemen. The immigrant factor is quite evident.

Does this ignorance of nation of origin mean we're more parochial for claiming them for ourselves, or less because we appreciate them without concern for where they were born?

Neither. It means we don't know much about them, and we tend to assume that famous people who work in the U.S. are U.S.-born.

Stephen Harking is a Professor at Cambridge so how exactly can you say he hangs his hat in America?

Stephen Hawking I mean.

"Stephen Ha[w]king is a Professor at Cambridge so how exactly can you say he hangs his hat in America?"

...because until the last few seconds, I could have sworn he'd been teaching at Caltech for decades. Arrrgh. Mea culpa. I suppose that's one thing the NEA chairman has over me. ....That really bugs me, now. Hawking receives so much exposure in American documentary film and footage and books, that I'd just naturally assumed...

I believe Christopher Hitchens became a US citizen recently.

It almost makes you think that the current crop of "serious" artists spend all their time looking to the NEA for grants and don't don't give a fig about what the public thinks of them.

J, for some reason I was under the exact same misconception about Hawking as Paul. If anything though, this just strengthens my idea that we really don't keep track of who is American and who isn't. (At least along the Anglo-American divide.)

Buck, Christopher Hitchens did get American citizenship this year. I guess I just have a hard time thinking of him being American and his brother Peter being British. Let me put it this way: if the British version of the NEA asked people to name contemporary British "social thinkers" I wouldn't be surprised if many people responded with C.Hitchens.

Paul, I agree that it's just as hard or harder to figure out who's alive and who isn't then where people were born/currently work. (Being more than a little geeky, I also thought of both Djikstra and Feinman.) I guess a more relevant question would really be to name people who are active in a contemporary period, but that doesn't make for as good of a pull quote.

The reason people can't name many living members of those artistic fields is that those artistic fields are no longer relevant. Name a living poet? You might as well ask me to name a living yo-yo expert.

"The "grievous scientific errors" you're stacking against that are what, exactly?"

Don't know about Pauling, but Carson failed to consider that the cure might be worse than the "disease". She belongs on a list with Hitler and Pol Pot. Or maybe not - the death toll from her work is more in the Stalin/Mao league. The idea that the chairman would put her on a list with somebody like Jonas Salk is sickening.

My favorite art critic is, of course, E.Buzz Miller ( http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/#mea=2381 ).

"Fifty years ago, I suspect..."

The market in/for artistic output has changed too much for that comparison to work.

"Of course, this list assumes that classical music, etc. is more worthy of knowing than what appears on American Idol"

Classical music requires the coordination of a lot of skills, and is generally more difficult than the American Idol stuff. In other arts though...I've seen a lot of paintings and thought "that's not as good as that picture of the dogs playing poker".

We're simply victims of our own success. There are lots of scientists and artists and no room for superstars. People have their own niches to worry about.

Read Pinker's Blank Slate. There's no functional difference between high and low art other than as a status symbol. They both push the exact same genetic pleasure buttons, people say they like high art because that indicates they're high status.

Dan: I was thinking the same thing when I saw "classical musician". Either he means something a bit loose in definition, in which case people like Michael Jackson would qualify, or he means what I tend to think of, and that field stopped being productive in the 19th century.

In general, I got this sense that he doesn't know what constitutes art relevant to today. Even if we discard flashes in the pan, that still leaves some very prominent singers, digital artists, software developers, directors, novelists, essayists... and even some nascent bloggers.

al Gore, Tim Flannery, John Quiggin.

adrian: Wow, that was exactly the theory I came up with independently. I didn't know someone credible had it well-developed. It recently got empirical validation from Joshua Bell.

aaron: cute :-P

I think maybe Mr. NEA chairman should think about the changes in this country, and worldwide in the last 50 years. What made the people he lists notable in the first place? What would make them notable now. Is Michael Graves famous because every Target store in the US has his stuff? Or because he is a famous architect? Or is he even notable?

The flip side of the coin is how many brilliant scientists are on the payroll of a company which effectively owns their intellectual output?

Do you know Steve Sqyres [Mars Rovers] Burt Rutan [Space Ship One] Mike Griffin [NASA cheif, and holder of a bazillion degrees and an unknown number of patents]

How about Dean Kamen? no? do you remember what a segway is? He has invented many other devices, some of which may have already saved your life.

I think the reason we don't know the names, is the same reason why you may never have heard of Big Guitars From Memphis... They're a great band, but there are SO MANY GREAT BANDS... it just isn't good enough.

As individuals we have gone in to a niche driven period where we can each configure the art we like, the music, the writing, in the end everything. As the niche suggests though, the fact that I like some singer from Chicago named Michael Mcdermott, doesn't probably hit anyone that wasn't there to hear him. Just like no-one outside of Denver would know who the Fray were, if it hadn't been played FAR TOO OFTEN on that Gray's Anatomy commercial. And those are the people who WANT notariety.

No-one will remember the person who hit's the breakthrough in quantum computing, they'll just know that they can winge about how slow the new software is, faster.

D

JSinger is right. Rachel Carson's "error" wasn't -- she overlooked a consequence of DDT elimination but correctly nailed a consequence of its use and that's what scientists do. She alerted people to an important trade-off. Policymakers all over the globe then made their decisions. And in fact, discontinuing the use of DDT in the US is generally seen as a great idea. Morally equating her with Stalin and Mao for that error requires a freakish concentration of dumb.

And Pauling's error? Dude, if you genuinely put the vitamin C shenanigans, or his "wrong" structure of DNA, as cancelling out all the guy's achievements -- you really have no idea what a scientist does. Period.

I'm reminded of that Simpsons episode where Marge aske Homer to name Bart's friends ... "the nerd, the kid with glasses, the fat one who always has his hands in his pockets ..."

I IS IN UR INTERNET,

MAKING U MOR IGNRNT

"Does this ignorance of nation of origin mean we're more parochial for claiming them for ourselves, or less because we appreciate them without concern for where they were born?"

"Neither. It means we don't know much about them, and we tend to assume that famous people who work in the U.S. are U.S.-born."

It means that we don't care whether people are American by birth or by choice. They're here, and that's all that really matters.

John

What a load of elitist tripe.

Classical music is not culture. Popular music is.

Plays are not culture. Movies and TV are.

The basic disconnect is that Mr. NEA thinks his shit matters. It doesn't. He thinks we're out of touch? He's the one that's out of touch.

As an aside I suspect his musings about "50 years ago" are 100% false.

I gotta hand it to ya, Noah, your answer makes a lotta since. Those who would really appreciate the question, as well as the hidden answers, might even enjoy that latte with pinky raised, hi!

Has the Chairman of the NEA considered searching Wikipedia for notable Americans in each of the fields specified?

The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts issues this challenge:
“I'd ask [ordinary Americans] how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.”

Which seems to limit the question to exactly those categories most in need of NEA life support.

Plenty of people are still writing lyric poetry that people care about. It’s mostly set to music, so it’s not what he calls poetry.

Plenty of people are writing drama that people care about. The share that involves laborious live performances for each new audience that walks into the building is small. That kind gives the dramatist the smallest possible audience and the lowest possible return. No wonder most dramatists are writing for the screen these days.

Plenty of people are still writing in the western orchestral tradition. Only the subset that most people are uninterested in counts as “classical” today. Why is that? Mozart was a popular composer, back in the day. What exactly is the categorical difference between the Magic Flute and musical theatre? Sure, Leonard Bernstein was fairly well known 50 years ago. Maybe On the Town and West Side Story had something to do with that. When did classical music get defined as “orchestral music, as long as it’s unpopular”?

Business titans are still well-known, however; who doesn't know Gates and Jobs and Welch and Trump, among many others?

I disagree that contemporary art is in too bad of a slump: Damien Hurst (British) is quite well-known, and there are good American artists as well (say, Gene Davis).

For poets: Maya Angelou is as big as frost, is she not? I don't care for Louise Gluck, but she's relatively well-known. Pinsky?

Public intellectuals: Ignatieff was nearly prime minister of Canada, and there are many well-known writers like Krugman; I don't think this a major problem.

Scientists: Tim Berners-Lee, Brian Greene, Bjorn Lomborg...

Architects: Frank Gehry is very well known. Wright's popularity is the exception that proves the rule, though, for architects. How many Americans could name any architect in Wright's day other than Wright?

We have two problems; first, pop culture has superseded some of the more traditional cultures (I bet you average American could name quite a few directors, and jazz musicians like Blakey and Coltrane can't be too obscure), and second, there is much more awareness of foreign culture.

I buy that anti-intellectualism is worrying, but not terribly so.

"pop culture has superseded some of the more traditional cultures"

This type of statement frustrates me to no end. Shakespeare was "pop culture" back in his day. So were Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.

yoyoma, riccardo muti, anoushka, the hot hot hot lisa randall, raman sundrum and of course brian greene - & if pj o'rourke counts maybe sneak in george carlin/bill maher under social commentary -

Ah, these articles always smack of cultural elitism. When I was in high-school or early college, my mother gave me a first edition of a book called (IIRC) 'The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy'. You know what it didn't have? Sports.

No Super Bowl.
No World Series.
No Indy 500.
No Daytona 500.
No Kentucky Derby.
No NY Yankees.
No Babe Ruth.
No Knute Rockne.
No Jesse Owens.
No Jackie Robinson.
No Joe Lewis.

And that's just some of the giants.

Second edition did, I think, but still the arrogance. How can anyone claim cultural literacy in the US without some (or I'd argue great) understanding of these people/events and there place in our history? Ah, but if you deine culture in a way that the rubes in Jesus-Land don't care about it, then of course we are so much less culturally literate then our betters on the staff of the NRO (Nordlinger and Derbyshire are opera snobs for example), the NY Times Theatre Reviewer and so on.

Yeah, so I don't know a living classical composer (unless you count John Williams...). Or a classical musician. But I like Alison Krause who is as talented on a Fiddle as any Violin player in any orchestra in the world.

And I know the names of the original members of Black Saabath who have had as great in influence on music over the last 30 years as any classical group / composer / musician.

Paris Hilton didn't make the list? I'm shocked.

To paraphrase: Mr NEA has a job funded by my tax money where he bemoans the fact that I don't know about things he gets paid to consider important.

I don't know who won the 1934 World Series either. I do know where I could find the answer if I needed to know.

"I don't know who won the 1934 World Series either."

There is a difference between trivia like that or who won the Gold in swimming in 1952 and cultural literacy like knowing about the '27 Yankees or Jesse Owens in Munich in '36.

Some events/people are just resonate more thorugh cultures than others. And, truthfully, you can learn a great deal bout the cultures by examining that resonance and trying to understand why. I'm am all for cultural literacy. I am just often annoyed about the pretentious nonsense that many people use to seperate 'Them' from 'Us' by using the tactic of 'if you don't understand X you can't be one of us', and these kind of things just add to it.

Kristian: I fully agree with your general point about the cultural elitism of the list. (Also with various specific points of various earlier posters, like noting that Bernstein and Mozart were able to write scores for successful commercial musical productions. How many of the current crop of NEA-supported High Artists is comparable?)

However, I'm not convinced that the absence of sports shows the cluelessness of the list. It seems to me that sports figures tend to be comparable to current politicians or military officials, with a high profile for a while but only a small chance to influence people later. Who on your list of sports figures would be remembered after 200 years of normal history? I don't have much respect for Carson, Mead, or Kinsey, but I think they have a reasonable chance to be remembered. (Not necessarily favorably...)

This timeless-vs.-transient distinction seems to show up even within subfields of culture, even within one person's body of work. E.g., Mark Twain seems to be remembered much more his relatively timeless stuff than for stuff directly addressing events of the time. (Some might argue it'd be a good thing if people *did* remember Twain on the Spanish-American War and its aftermath. But I think few would argue that people *do* remember.)

Well, Derbyshire and Nordlingler are hardly 'of the left'. If so, the consevatives have routed the field, speared the surviors, and salted the earth of the left.

There is a lot more to culture and cultural literacy than just classical musicians, poets and serious authors. The sports thing was just one example. Cusine is another. (Auguste Escoffie has shaped the whole concept of fine dining throughout the Western World.) Fashion is yet another. And so on.

Again, what is annoying me about this subject is no matter what group you talk to, there are huge blind spots in there appreciation of the greatness that exists among us all, today, in plain view. I just jumped on sports because it a sore spot with me.

Wait-- living American sculptor of any lasting artistic merit? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

As a non-American, should I be appalled or amused that not a single list in this thread has failed to appropriate for the U.S. somebody who is not in any way American?

The only good art made in the last 20 years has been made by people who the chairman of the NEA has never heard of. And I suspect they would all spit on his high and mighty idea of art. DIY OR DIE.

Wow!!!

What a racket?!?!

Run an organization funded with millions in taxpayer money. Consequently remove high culture from the need to build a popular audience. Bemoan the fact that the general public isn't familiar with high culture as evidence that your organization needs massive increases in funding. Repeat.

I will admit to being a Philistine, but most modern sculpture I've seen in museums seems like kind of interesting playing with abstract shapes--intellecutally interesting, but not really beautiful or satisfying in the way that a lot of older sculpture is. I think the same is true of most modern paintings I've seen in museums/galleries. There will be some really good stuff, next to wall after wall of stuff that I can't distinguish from random paint splatters, or that looks to my untutored eye like something produced by a grade school kid. Maybe this just means that I need to study for years to enjoy their work. But while I'm sure deeper study would let me get more from Renoir's paintings or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I can appreciate something of those works without all that education--and this provides a kind of internal motivation to want to learn more. The same seems true of a lot of what I think of as modern compositions in music.

I can think of some scientists I expect will have had a big effect 50 years from now: Rivest and Merkle and Hellman and Diffie were in at the birth of public key cryptography, Trivers in evolution/game theory, Becker in economics, Cosmides and Toohey in psychology, Edward O Wilson in evolutionary biology. I am sure I'm not getting a fair sample, though, and I'm surely missing a bunch of people. And I'm *much* more confident in my own field than in the other fields in which I just have some interest.

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