This is a list of notable autodidacts. The list includes people who have been partially or wholly self-taught. Some notables listed did receive formal educations, including some college, although not in the field(s) for which they became prominent.
Because of the large increase in years of education since 1800, especially during the early 20th century, it is difficult to define autodidactism and to compare autodidacts during different time periods.
Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years. [15]
George BooleJnr was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854) which contains Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the Information Age alongside the work of Claude Shannon.
Autodidacticism or self-education is the practice of education without the guidance of schoolmasters.
The Conservatoire national des arts et métiers is an AMBA-accredited French grande école and grand établissement. It is a member of the Conférence des Grandes écoles, which is an equivalent to the Ivy League schools in the United States, Oxbridge in the United Kingdom, the C9 League in China, or the Imperial Universities in Japan. CNAM is one of the founding Schools of the Grande école system, with École polytechnique and Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1794, in the wake of the French Revolution.
Leibniz University Hannover, also known as the University of Hannover, is a public research university located in Hanover, Germany. Founded on 2 May 1831 as Higher Vocational School, the university has undergone six periods of renaming, its most recent in 2006.
Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, is a public research university located in Moscow Oblast, Russia. It prepares specialists in theoretical and applied physics, applied mathematics and related disciplines.
Osaka University, abbreviated as OU or Handai (阪大), is a national research university in Osaka, Japan. The university traces its roots back to Edo-era institutions Tekijuku (1838) and Kaitokudo (1724), and was officially established in 1931 as the sixth of the Imperial Universities in Japan, with two faculties: science and medicine. Following the post-war educational reform, it merged with three pre-war higher schools, reorganizing as a comprehensive university with five faculties: science, medicine, letters, law and economics, and engineering. After the merger with Osaka University of Foreign Studies in 2007, Osaka University became the largest national university in Japan by undergraduate enrollment.
Education has been of prime interest to Poland's rulers since the early 12th century. The catalog of the library of the Cathedral Chapter in Kraków dating from 1110 shows that Polish scholars already then had access to western European literature. In 1364, King Casimir III the Great founded the Cracow Academy, which would become one of the great universities of Europe. The Polish people have made considerable contributions in the fields of science, technology and mathematics. The list of famous scientists in Poland begins in earnest with the polymath, astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus, who formulated the heliocentric theory and sparked the European Scientific Revolution.
Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole. Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.
Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) was a British mathematician and logician best known for formulating De Morgan's laws. De Morgan is also known for coining the term mathematical induction and formalizing the principles underlying induction. De Morgan's contributions to logic have been used in set theory, probability theory, computer science, and other fields.
Bibhuprasad Mohapatra is an Odia writer from Odisha, India. He has popularized science in both English and Odia. He began contributing regularly to English and Odia newspapers and magazines in 2012. He was a regular contributor to Press Information Bureau (PIB).
Paul J. Nahin is an American electrical engineer, author, and former college professor. He has written over 20 books on topics in physics and mathematics.
Solenoid is a 2015 novel by Mircea Cărtărescu written in the 2010s and, according to Cărtărescu, in a single draft without revision. The English translation by Sean Cotter was published in 2022.
Hendrix aprendió a tocar la guitarra de forma autodidacta. Memorizó los primeros acordes y trucos fijándose en humildes músicos del barrio.
Django Reinhardt, (1910–1943), nació en Bélgica en el seno de una familia gitana y fue el primer músico de jazz europeo de aceptación universal, y también el más grande hasta ahora. Analfabeto, autodidacta, incapaz de escribir una sola nota o de leer una partitura, era también un hombre con poca disciplina para el estudio, jugador empedernido y juerguista a mas no poder.