Who in the world has super taste, a feel for and way of picking subjects that, decades in the future, will seem prescient, as though they had a line on the future?
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Some examples: the late Marvin Minsky's utterly extraordinary list of students and collaborators: https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/people.html … (from Ivan Sutherland to Terry Winograd to Eric Drexler to...)
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Murray Gell-Mann's extraordinary list of proteges include Ken Wilson, John Schwartz, Jim Hartle, and, in a way, the whole Santa Fe Institute.
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Stewart Brand saw so much early: Engelbart & human augmentation; the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey; the population bomb (he worked with Ehrlich); Xerox PARC; the Well (one of the first online communities); the Whole Earth Catalog; and so much else: http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html …
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More people: I can make a case for George Church, Jane Jacobs, Eric Drexler, and many others. In each case they saw multiple things, often in (supposedly) unconnected disciplines, decades ahead of the mainstream.
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Who else can you think of? What did they see, decades before almost everyone else?
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More good examples: John Wheeler, Hal Abelson (suggested by
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Just a clarification: I mean people who are right over and over again. Not just that they founded a field, but rather that they were a key enabler in the early days of many, many fields. Eg, Minsky's proteges helped found perhaps a dozen or more distinct fields or subfields.
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To reiterate: lots of people are mentioning field founders. Which is great, but not the question. The question is: who helped enable new fields to emerge, over & over & over & over again. Eg, I can name a dozen fields or subfields for Minsky.
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“a famous professor who is excellent at picking students”, while amazing, does seem pretty different from just “good at picking subjects that will be interesting in the future”
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I don't know what you mean. Thousands of people have MInsky's level of position and fame. I doubt 20 have his taste in or ability to enable students.
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