Anna Kriger

He is the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes that he did not have to share with anybody. He worked out why atoms hold together at all. He found the shape a protein folds into, and got it right while the best crystallographers in Britain were getting it wrong. He proved that a disease could...

He solved the problem of the missing planet in a few weeks, and told almost no one how. He worked out the geometry of curved space decades before anyone published it, and locked the pages in a drawer. He wrote his most explosive result about an asteroid as a coded cipher, so that he could claim...

Nos enseñan que la generosidad siempre es una virtud, que quien da más es mejor persona y que el amor se mide por cuánto de nosotros mismos estamos dispuestos a entregar. Pero ¿qué sucede cuando dar deja de nacer de la plenitud y empieza a nacer del miedo: miedo al rechazo, a la...

In 1948 a shy, unicycling engineer at Bell Laboratories published a paper that quietly rebuilt the twentieth century, and he did it by refusing to answer the most interesting question in his field. Claude Shannon wanted to know how much could be sent through a wire. He did not want to know what...

His family cut stone in Salzburg for three generations. Christian Doppler was too frail to lift it, so he was sent off to do arithmetic instead, which everyone agreed was a lesser calling. In May 1842, in a half-empty room in Prague, he stood up before a learned society and explained why the...

Two sisters. One guest. A quiet decision that quietly runs your whole life.We know the scene without having to be told it. One sister works herself ragged getting dinner on the table. The other simply sits and listens. For centuries the busy sister has been scolded and the quiet one praised, and...

We are the best-informed, best-supplied, longest-living human beings who have ever existed, and a startling number of us go through the day with the quiet sense that the floor is not entirely attached to the building. Not fear of anything nameable. Just a low hum underneath an ordinary Tuesday...

A surgeon glances at a patient and says, before any test comes back, that something is wrong. A negotiator hears one sentence and knows the deal is dead. A mother wakes a moment before her child cries. We call this intuition, and we treat it as a small miracle, a whisper from somewhere beyond...

Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.This is a book about what that costs — and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci...

Somewhere inside every one of us lives an accountant. He keeps a ledger of who owes what, tallies every slight, and calls the balance justice. He is not a villain. He is the reason civilization works. He is also the reason you cannot sleep at three in the morning, prosecuting an argument that...