[montrose]

"Although it might seem a sane and reasonable business, the world’s great engineers, she believes, were "very eccentric characters, all very tenacious, the sort who were cheeky at school and didn’t do what their parents wanted them to do"."

[reallymental]

That's all very nicely put, to fit a lot of people into that mould don't you think? Very 'horoscopic'.

Everyone is disagreeable & eccentric to some extent when they were young, including the world's great engineers/theorists.

There's more to this equation, add parameter of hard work, a bit of obsession (or 'passion', whatever that is...), a bit of environmental 'push', and THEN perhaps that might yield a 'great' individual who does that one thing very well.

[WJW]

In other news, 100% of known engineers is human.

A much more interesting piece of information would be how many people have those characteristics, but do _not_ turn out to be great engineers.