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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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 @mhartl ).
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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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Dennis Sciama?
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Probably a very good example from all I've heard.
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Surely David Hilbert counts right?
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Good example.
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Part of what I was thinking in my response to
@mhartl was: hey, Abelson (& Sussman) helped enable people like@wilbanks and@kaythaney, talk about awesome taste!
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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, J. B. S. Haldane. Although for the really prescient predictions you may have to turn to H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley.
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If you allow math (for which the role of an advisor is as important as in any other science, despite the popular image of lone geniuses), one might mention Weil (the whole Bourbaki, Grothendieck, and Langlands), Atiyah (who recognized Witten and Kontsevich), and Gelfand...
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