Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, is one of the world's leading authorities on the intellectually eminent, whom he has studied since his Harvard grad-school days in the 1970s. The latest, and possibly most comprehensive, entry into this genre is Dean Keith Simonton's new book Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies (Springer Publishing Co., 227 pages).
Last year, pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. In the modern era, Immanuel Kant and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs.
How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. Follow it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts � or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes?
