I have an example of a lone genius, Calvin Mooers. He's best known for his work in information retrieval; he coined the terms 'information retrieval' and 'descriptor', among other things. He's also known for the TRAC programming language.
But he's little known in my field of chemical information. You have to read the original papers carefully to discover that he came up with the first concrete method to represent a molecular structure on a computer, a proposal for how to search molecular structures via arbitrary query topology, and the idea that there is a simple algorithm (though not practical) for producing a canonical description of a molecular graph.
As far as I can tell, he was 5 years ahead of the rest of the field, and the founding papers in my field all cite him as a source of their ideas. (That said, his ideas were not all implementable. His method for substructure isomorphism is hand-waving optimism, for example.)
Unlike the other pioneers of IR, he was self-employed (Luhn was high up at IBM, Taube was originally high up at the Library of Congress, etc) with no collaborators. But to all accounts, it was not easy to work with him. As one person described it, he didn't like other people playing with his toys. (Eg, see the fallout on his attempt to protect TRAC by trademarking its name. He was 10 years before Microsoft's much more famous 'Open Letter to Hobbyists'.)
But he's little known in my field of chemical information. You have to read the original papers carefully to discover that he came up with the first concrete method to represent a molecular structure on a computer, a proposal for how to search molecular structures via arbitrary query topology, and the idea that there is a simple algorithm (though not practical) for producing a canonical description of a molecular graph.
As far as I can tell, he was 5 years ahead of the rest of the field, and the founding papers in my field all cite him as a source of their ideas. (That said, his ideas were not all implementable. His method for substructure isomorphism is hand-waving optimism, for example.)
Unlike the other pioneers of IR, he was self-employed (Luhn was high up at IBM, Taube was originally high up at the Library of Congress, etc) with no collaborators. But to all accounts, it was not easy to work with him. As one person described it, he didn't like other people playing with his toys. (Eg, see the fallout on his attempt to protect TRAC by trademarking its name. He was 10 years before Microsoft's much more famous 'Open Letter to Hobbyists'.)