Who is the most misunderstood genius in history?

People whose work was dismissed, misfiled or credited elsewhere while they were alive. A few were vindicated within a decade; others waited a century.

1. 1
   Alan Turing

   Broke Enigma and defined computation, then was prosecuted for being gay and pardoned only in 2013.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Ignaz Semmelweis

   Proved handwashing saved mothers' lives, was ridiculed by his profession and died in an asylum.
   600pts
3. 3
   Kurt Godel

   Showed mathematics can never prove all its own truths, then spent his last years in isolation.
   551pts
4. 4
   Galileo Galilei

   Tried by the Inquisition for arguing that the Earth moves; formally rehabilitated in 1992.
   494pts
5. 5
   Charles Babbage

   Designed a programmable computer in the 1830s and never finished building one.
   494pts
6. 6
   Ludwig Boltzmann

   Fought for the reality of atoms against senior colleagues and died before the argument was won.
   428pts
7. 7
   Nikola Tesla

   Died in a New York hotel room in debt, decades before the internet made him a folk hero.
   350pts
8. 8
   Vincent van Gogh

   Sold almost nothing in his lifetime and now anchors the most expensive rooms in any museum.
   257pts
9. 9
   Srinivasa Ramanujan

   A self-taught clerk from Madras whose notebooks are still yielding new mathematics.
   257pts
10. 10
    Alfred Wegener

    Proposed continental drift in 1912 and was mocked until plate tectonics proved him right.
    257pts
11. 11
    Thomas Edison

    Remembered as a patent machine and a businessman, which undersells the research method he invented.
    257pts
12. 12
    Ada Lovelace

    Wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine, and was read as a footnote to Babbage for a century.
    257pts
13. 13
    Emily Dickinson

    Published fewer than a dozen poems while alive; nearly 1,800 were found after her death.
    257pts
14. 14
    Gregor Mendel

    His pea experiments founded genetics and were ignored for 35 years.
    143pts
15. 15
    Rosalind Franklin

    Her X-ray images made the double helix visible; the Nobel went to three men.
    143pts