Matt’s Treehouse of Awesome Dudes
In the treehouse
These are the select few who get to party in the actual treehouse. To be clear, this is an awesome treehouse with several levels, and at least one bridge. I guess these people just kind of hang out in it.
Emperor Joshua Norton I
Joshua I was the first and last emperor of the United States of America. The story is that he woke up one day, fed up with politics, and decided it was time to rescue the country from itself. So he declared himself emperor and disbanded congress.
I don’t think anybody honestly took him seriously, but he acted the part and took himself seriously, so people started following him. You can look up more details on your own, but one cool fact is that when he died his apartment was searched, and nothing of value was found.
Emperor Joshua I didn’t hurt anybody or do anything for personal gain. He was king, he knew he was king, and that was all he needed.
Hypatia of Alexandria
Hypatia was a mathematician, a physicist, an astronomer, and a philosopher around 350 CE in Alexandria. In a time and place where women were seen as property, she (an allegedly stunningly attractive woman) moved confidently through a world of men, basically doing whatever she wanted. This was okay because she was a scientific badass.
Her discoveries were all pretty complex and I don't want to write a million pages about it. Unfortunately, due to her being a woman, a lot of things she probably did are credited to others, and we really have no way of knowing.
Christianity was taking over in her time, and the church saw science as paganism. In March 415, she was dragged out of a chariot, stripped naked, flayed to the bone, and dragged around the city by a Christian mob.
Some see Hypatia as a figurative last librarian in the Great Library of Alexandria, as her death was the harbinger of its destruction and the dark ages.
President Theodore Roosevelt
Okay this guy is a given. No description needed.
Archimedes of Syracuse
Archimedes was the baddest-ass mathematician ever to put pencil to paper (metaphorically speaking, that is). Mathematically, he used calculus before it was invented to approximate pi before irrational numbers were expressible.
He also fought the Romans and did a good job. In one battle, the Romans were closing in on Syracuse, and Archimedes instructed villagers to throw ropes over the walls. When the Romans saw the ropes, they ran away, fearing another of Archimedes’s inventions.
Invited to the barbecue under the treehouse
These are essentially the honorable mentions. They are all extremely awesome, but I felt they would overcrowd the actual treehouse, and that they were not awesome in enough ways. Were the treehouse a little bigger, maybe they would be allowed inside.
Freiherr Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
As you may or may not know, Freiherr is a German title indicating nobility. One might ask, “who gave Leibniz that title?” The answer is, he did.
Leibniz was a philosopher (among many other things) who felt that the human race needed to formalize our knowledge of everything, so that it would be as tangible as mathematics. This way, there could be no arguments, and no war. He actually set out to do this, and he began with mathematics.
He then invented calculus. Leibniz is here because I feel that it takes a very special kind of person to start with a completely stupid idea like his, and end up with calculus. Good job, sir.
Leonhard Euler
When Euler was 20, he entered the Paris Academy Prize Problem competition (one of the most prestigious scientific competitions of the day) and won second place. The question was about placement of masts on a ship, and first place went to Pierre Bouguer—the father of naval architecture. Also, Euler was Swiss (there is a lake in Switzerland).
Oh, also Euler went on to win that prize 12 times.
If you are into mathematics, you may know that such as Greene’s Theorem and Laplace transforms (and many, many other concepts) are named after the second person to discover them, because Euler was always first. It would be too confusing to name them all after him though.
Euler discovered functions, e, summations, sine functions, and a mess of other stuff. When he went blind, he became even more prolific.
Euler was ridiculous, and if he were still alive today, we would be in every galaxy in the universe.
Others
This is an ongoing list. Please let me know if you think I’ve left anyone off. If I say no, don’t be offended, because I have unfairly high standards for this list.
One common complaint is that there are no women. I think history excludes most of the awesome women. But no, I do not say “awesome dude” as a gendered term. I would love to add a woman to the list, but I refuse to add anyone as a token.
Here are some people that I will add to the list when I get the chance to actually write some details:
- Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming “Jack” Churchill
- Johann Carl Friedrich Gauß
- Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey, Ph.D., M.D.