# Who is the greatest self-taught genius in history?

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

*By YPB Team · Published September 1, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-self-taught-genius-in-history*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Leonardo da Vinci** — score 1000/1000
   Trained as a studio painter, learned anatomy, hydraulics and flight by looking and drawing.
2. **Benjamin Franklin** — score 772/1000
   Left school at ten, apprenticed to a printer, and ended up a scientist and a diplomat.
3. **Michael Faraday** — score 579/1000
   A bookbinder's apprentice who read the volumes he was binding and became the century's great experimentalist.
4. **The Wright Brothers** — score 463/1000
   Bicycle mechanics with no engineering degrees who solved control before anyone solved lift.
5. **Frederick Douglass** — score 463/1000
   Taught himself to read while enslaved, then became the most formidable orator in America.
6. **Nikola Tesla** — score 463/1000
   Studied engineering at Graz and Prague without taking a degree, then built a grid from first principles.
7. **Henry Ford** — score 463/1000
   Left the family farm at sixteen and learned machining on the job.
8. **Antonie van Leeuwenhoek** — score 392/1000
   A Delft draper who ground lenses as a hobby and was first to see bacteria.
9. **Thomas Paine** — score 392/1000
   A corset maker's son who left school at twelve and wrote the pamphlet that argued for a revolution.
10. **Thomas Edison** — score 309/1000
   Had roughly three months of formal schooling and was taught the rest by his mother and by print shops.
11. **Abraham Lincoln** — score 309/1000
   About a year of schooling in total; taught himself law from borrowed books.
12. **Mary Anning** — score 309/1000
   A Lyme Regis fossil collector with no schooling whose finds rewrote early palaeontology.
13. **William Herschel** — score 210/1000
   A working musician who ground his own mirrors and discovered Uranus.
14. **Srinivasa Ramanujan** — score 93/1000
   Worked from a single borrowed textbook and produced results that took decades to prove.
15. **James Watt** — score 93/1000
   An instrument maker who improved the steam engine by understanding where its heat went.

Tags: historical-figures, science, inventors