Everyone wants to be a genius, but very few people have the ability to achieve it through hard work and toil. Some people are born with a brain sophisticated enough to be called a genius. They are the people whose future looks bright from the very beginning. But history shows us that not all of these people lived long enough to unleash their full potential. Some of them couldn’t even make their way past their teenage years. Here is a list of ten such people in history who were a big waste of potential.
1. Evariste Galois was a great mathematician who developed much of the foundation of abstract algebra and made astounding contributions to mathematics only to die at the age of 20 in a duel.
French mathematician, Évariste Galois, was born in Bourg-la-Reine on 25 October 1811. At the age of 12, he entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, but at 14 he became bored with his studies. His only area of interest remained Mathematics. At the age of 15, Galois was already studying the original papers of the celebrated 18th-century mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange. When Galois was 18, he began publishing papers.
On the 30th of May 1832, 20-year-old Evariste Galois took part in an ill-advised duel. The true motives behind the duel are obscure, but Galois was convinced of his impending death. So, the day before the duel he stayed up all night, writing out many mathematical ideas and sent them to his friend Auguste Chevalier. During the duel, Galois was shot in the stomach. Hours later he was discovered by a peasant who took him to a hospital. Before dying, he said the following words to his brother Alfred: “Don’t cry. I need all my courage to die at 20.”(1,2)
2. Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna Mozart, was a musical genius just like her brother and sometimes received top billing over her brother when they toured as children. But once she became a marriageable age, her parents forced her to stop performing and settle down.
Maria Anna Mozart, the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was a talented musician just like him. When Mozart was a toddler, Maria Anna (four and one-half years older) was his idol. Her father Leopold Mozart started teaching her to play the harpsichord when she was seven years old. According to Maynard Solomon, “At three, Mozart was inspired to study music by observing his father’s instruction of Marianne; he wanted to be like her.”
To showcase Maria’s and her brother’s talent, their father took them on tours of many cities such as Vienna and Paris. She was noted as an excellent harpsichord player and fortepianist. In the early days, she sometimes received top billing. But from the age of 18, her parents forbid her from touring and showcasing her artistic talent. This was because according to societal expectations at that time, a girl of marriageable age should settle down.(source)
3. Henry Moseley was an extremely gifted English physicist who died in the Battle of Gallipoli during WWI. He had made numerous contributions to the field of physics before volunteering for the Royal Engineers in the British Army. He was only 27 when he was shot and killed in combat.
English physicist Henry Moseley was born in 1887. His love for physics grew early. During his school days, he found physics lessons were too easy and started working on the subject independently. After completing his college education from the University of Oxford’s Trinity College, he joined Ernest Rutherford’s research group in 1910. There he invented the atomic battery and called it radium battery. In 1913, he used self-built equipment to prove that every element’s identity is uniquely determined by the number of protons it has. This enabled him to predict the existence of four new chemical elements.
In 1914, he planned to return to Oxford but World War I broke out in August 1914. Moseley enlisted with the Royal Engineers of the British Army. In the beginning, in April 1915, he served as a technical officer in communications during the Battle of Gallipoli which was fought in Turkey. On 10 August 1915, he was shot in the head by a Turkish sniper while in the act of telephoning a military order. He was only 27 years old at the time of his death.(1,2)
4. Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who had almost no formal training in pure mathematics but compiled nearly 3,900 identities and equations. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of 32.
In 1913, the English mathematician G. H. Hardy received a strange letter from an unknown clerk in Madras, India. The ten-page letter contained about 120 statements of theorems. He took them to his collaborator J. E. Littlewood. After a few hours they concluded that the results “must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.” The unknown clerk was none other than Srinivasa Ramanujan. Hardy wrote enthusiastically back to Ramanujan and brought him to England in 1914. Ramanujan’s arrival at Cambridge was the beginning of a very successful five-year collaboration with Hardy. He was amazed by Ramanujan’s uncanny formal intuition in manipulating infinite series and continued fractions.
Even though his time in England was mathematically productive, the climate and culture of the country took a toll on Ramanujan’s health. He was a high-caste Brahmin, so he shunned non-vegetarian food. But in England he found it quite difficult to obtain pure vegetarian food, so he had to do his own cooking. Wartime shortages only made things worse. In 1917 he was hospitalized, but his health improved by late 1918. He returned to India in 1919, but his health failed again, and he died the next year.(source)
5. Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian mathematician, made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields but was largely unrecognized during his lifetime. He died at the age of 26 after contracting tuberculosis. The Abel Prize in mathematics is named in his honor.
Niels Henrik Abel was born on 5 August 1802 in Nedstrand, Norway. At the age of 15, his mathematical talent was recognized by a mathematics teacher, Brent Michael Holmboe. In 1820 his father died, leaving the family in strained circumstances. But his mathematics teacher contributed and raised funds which enabled Abel to continue his studies and achieve a preliminary degree from the University of Christiania in Oslo. In 1823, his first papers were published.
Until 1828 he published a number of papers, but he was largely unrecognized during his lifetime. He made his discoveries while living in poverty. In 1828 he contracted tuberculosis in Paris. He died on 6 April 1829, just two days before a letter arrived from August Crelle. Crelle had managed to have Abel appointed as a professor at the University of Berlin, but the good news came too late.(1,2)
6. Brandenn Brenner was a child prodigy and taught himself how to read at 18 months. He started playing piano at age three and graduated high school at age ten. At the age of 14, he ended his life by shooting himself in the head.
Brandenn E. Bremmer was everything that a child prodigy should be. At the age when normally children learn how to pronounce words, Brandenn began to read. When he was three, he could finish the schoolwork of an average first-grader along with being able to play the piano. By the age of ten, he graduated from high school. At 11, he started college and was preparing to become an anesthesiologist. His life held great promise for the future. But on 15 March 2005, at the age of 14, Brandenn ended all hope for his future with a self-inflicted gunshot to his head.(source)
7. Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was an extremely influential French physicist credited with the foundation of thermodynamics. Unfortunately, he died of cholera in his 30s, and his home and all his unpublished research were burned.
French military engineer and physicist, Sadi Carnot, is often described as the “father of thermodynamics”. He is famous for his description of the Carnot cycle, related to the theory of heat engines. At the age of 16, he entered École Polytechnique and graduated in 1814. Soon he became an officer in the French Army’s Corps of Engineers. In 1819, Sadi transferred to Paris and remained on call for military duty. There he dedicated most of his attention to private intellectual pursuits and received only two-thirds pay. Carnot befriended the scientist Nicolas Clément and attended lectures on physics and chemistry. Soon, he became interested in improving the performance of steam engines. This led him to the investigations that became his Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire published in 1824.
Carnot retired from the army in 1828 without a pension and described himself as a “constructor of steam engines in Paris.” In 1832 he was admitted to a private asylum suffering from “mania” and “general delirium”. He died of cholera shortly thereafter at the age of 36.(1,2)
8. Branwell Bronte, the brother of novelist Emily Bronte, was seen as the prodigy of his family. But he wasted his potential with alcohol and drugs before dying due to tuberculosis at the age of 31.
Born on 26 June 1817, Patrick Branwell Brontë was the fourth of six children and the only son of Patrick Brontë. His sisters went to school, but he was rigorously tutored at home by his father. As a young boy, Brontë read extensively. At age 11, in January 1829, he began producing a magazine which included his poems, plays, criticisms, histories, and dialogues. In 1834. he painted a portrait of his three sisters. He included his own image but became dissatisfied with it and painted it out. Branwell was a talented writer, but he wasn’t a genius like his sisters. Their father wanted him to be successful so he could take care of his sisters. He suffered a lot of embarrassment when he didn’t have success. His riotous drinking sessions and drug abuse were other reasons for his failure.
In January 1843, Branwell took up a tutoring position in Thorp Green and became infatuated with his employer’s wife who was 15 years senior to him. After his employer’s death, his wife made it clear to Branwell that she was not going to marry him. He then “declined into chronic alcoholism, opiates, and debt.” His behavior became increasingly impossible and embarrassing to the family. On 24 September 1848, Brontë died due to tuberculosis aggravated by delirium tremens, alcoholism, and laudanum and opium addiction. But his death certificate only notes “chronic bronchitis-marasmus” as the cause.(source)
9. William James Sidis was an American child prodigy who had exceptional mathematical abilities and claimed mastery of over 40 languages. He entered Harvard at the age of 11, but eventually, he avoided mathematics altogether and wrote on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms.
Born in Boston in 1898, William James Sidis made the headlines in the early 20th century as a child prodigy. He had an amazing intellect and his IQ was estimated to be 50 to 100 points higher than Albert Einstein’s. By two years old he could read and type letters on a typewriter in both English and French. He wrote one such letter to Macy’s, inquiring about toys. He was accepted to Harvard at the age of 11 and graduated at 16, cum laude.
After leaving Harvard, he briefly taught mathematics at a school that is now Rice University in Houston, Texas. His fame and the fact that he was younger than every student he taught made it difficult for him. Under that strain, he resigned and moved back to Boston. Soon, he began moving city to city, job to job, always changing his name to keep from being discovered. During this time, it’s believed he wrote dozens of books under pseudonyms. In 1937, The New Yorker printed an article titled “April Fool!” which described William’s fall from grace in humiliating detail. Sidis sued The New Yorker, and the case was eventually settled seven years later. But the damage was done. On a summer day in July 1944, William’s landlady found him unconscious in his small, Boston apartment. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at the age of 46.(1,2)
10. Antoine Lavoisier, considered as the “father of modern chemistry”, is responsible for the conversion of alchemy into chemistry but was executed during the French Revolution by a political enemy. The judge that sentenced him declared that the revolution didn’t need scientists.
The “father of modern chemistry”, Antoine Lavoisier, was a French nobleman and chemist. Some of his accomplishments include the discovery the role oxygen plays in combustion and recognizing and naming oxygen and hydrogen. He helped construct the metric system and predicted the existence of silicon. He was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element.
Along with being a chemist, he was a powerful member of a number of aristocratic councils and an administrator of the Ferme générale. When the French Revolution began in 1789, he chose to stay in France instead of going abroad. At the height of the French Revolution, he was accused of selling adulterated tobacco. In May 1794, he was guillotined. Upon his death, his contemporary, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, commented, “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.”(1,2)