The 29 Greatest Self-Taught Geniuses in History

By YPB TeamSep 1

Formal schooling is thin on this list. Several of them left it before their teens; one taught himself to read against the law.

1
Leonardo da Vinci
Trained as a studio painter, learned anatomy, hydraulics and flight by looking and drawing.
1000pts
2
Benjamin Franklin
Left school at ten, apprenticed to a printer, and ended up a scientist and a diplomat.
772pts
3
Michael Faraday
A bookbinder's apprentice who read the volumes he was binding and became the century's great experimentalist.
579pts
4
The Wright Brothers
Bicycle mechanics with no engineering degrees who solved control before anyone solved lift.
463pts
5
Frederick Douglass
Taught himself to read while enslaved, then became the most formidable orator in America.
463pts
6
Nikola Tesla
Studied engineering at Graz and Prague without taking a degree, then built a grid from first principles.
463pts
7
Henry Ford
Left the family farm at sixteen and learned machining on the job.
463pts
8
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
A Delft draper who ground lenses as a hobby and was first to see bacteria.
392pts
9
Thomas Paine
A corset maker's son who left school at twelve and wrote the pamphlet that argued for a revolution.
392pts
10
Thomas Edison
Had roughly three months of formal schooling and was taught the rest by his mother and by print shops.
309pts
11
Abraham Lincoln
About a year of schooling in total; taught himself law from borrowed books.
309pts
12
Mary Anning
A Lyme Regis fossil collector with no schooling whose finds rewrote early palaeontology.
309pts
13
William Herschel
A working musician who ground his own mirrors and discovered Uranus.
210pts
14
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Worked from a single borrowed textbook and produced results that took decades to prove.
0pts
15
James Watt
An instrument maker who improved the steam engine by understanding where its heat went.
0pts
16
John Harrison
A Yorkshire carpenter with no formal training who taught himself clockmaking and built the marine chronometer that solved longitude at sea.
17
George Boole
Left school at sixteen, taught himself mathematics and languages, and invented the algebra of logic that every computer now runs on.
18
Oliver Heaviside
Left school at sixteen and taught himself the physics that let him recast Maxwell's equations into the four used today.
19
Sophie Germain
Taught herself mathematics from her father's library, wrote to Gauss under a man's name and won the Paris Academy's prize in 1816.
20
Mark Twain
Left school at eleven and educated himself as a printer's apprentice and riverboat pilot before writing Huckleberry Finn.
21
Frida Kahlo
Taught herself to paint while bedridden after a bus accident in 1925 and became Mexico's most famous artist.
22
Henri Rousseau
A Paris toll collector with no art training who began painting in his forties and was later championed by Picasso.
23
Vincent van Gogh
Started painting at twenty-seven, learned largely from books and copying, and produced some 2,100 works in a decade.
24
Frank Lloyd Wright
Left university without a degree and learned architecture in Chicago offices, then designed Fallingwater and the Guggenheim.
25
Tadao Ando
A former boxer with no architecture school who taught himself from books and travel and won the Pritzker Prize in 1995.
26
Stanley Kubrick
Never went to film school; a teenage Look magazine photographer, he taught himself filmmaking and made 2001: A Space Odyssey.
27
Jimi Hendrix
Taught himself guitar by ear, playing a right-handed instrument upside down, and reinvented what the electric guitar could do.
28
Malcolm X
Educated himself in prison by copying out the dictionary page by page and reading through the night.
29
Ray Bradbury
Could not afford college and educated himself in public libraries, later writing Fahrenheit 451 in a library basement.