Heroes

I have been in love with the lives of Ramanujan, Einstein, and recently Michael Faraday.
Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician. He lived for only about thirty odd years, during the years connecting the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. He was self-taught; mostly by proving the theorems in Carr's book. He was picked up by the famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy and was then known throughout the world. He was not philosophically deep and diverse by the way, his only love which seems to be on the edge of obsessiveness was what is now known as Number Theory. It was a romantic story anyways.
Einstein is known to all, more or less. His is one of the few great names in science. His passion was Physics. He was neither a prodigy nor extraordinary in his academic standing. He did his principal works during the beginning years of the twentieth century. He was a patent clerk then. He studied physics during his poly-technique life being indifferent to any other subject and continued studying during his time as a clerk. During his adolescence, he stumbled upon an idea: what would light look like if one could travel with it side-by-side? Light then should have seemed to be standing still, but nowhere he could find the description of a standing wave. He intermittently thought about the problem and ultimately in 1905 among other three important works proposed his revolutionary solution to the Aether mystery which has been called The Special Theory of Relativity since then. Later he extended this theory to incorporate acceleration and it was known as The General Theory of Relativity. In a sense, he too, was self-taught and worked out of pure passion.
While reading The Grand Design by Hawking, I have known some personal stories of Michael Faraday. He had to quit school at the age of thirteen and worked as a book-binder. The books he had to tend, were his source of learning. He did simple and cheap experiments out of curiosity. Later he was able to discover the influence of magnetic field both on electric charges and on polarized light, hitting upon the clue that all of these: electricity, magnetism, and light; are intimately connected. Besides, he fathered the concept of force field which had been the principal way of explaining how forces act upon bodies at a distance, till now. It is a treat to see how, on an overarching glass plate, the iron fillings get oriented (one or two taps to help them to win over friction) exactly according to the magnetic field extending between north and south poles of a magnet. He lived and worked during the first half of the nineteenth century. He also was self-taught and passion-driven.