Do a search on “Nathan Myhrvold” and “mad scientist,” and you’ll get nearly 2,000 hits, including profiles from the likes of The New Yorker, Esquire and Men’s Journal.
Myhrvold, however, would probably prefer the title of “polymath”: Over the course of his career, the 60-year-old tech wizard has been a postdoc physicist under Stephen Hawking’s wing, Microsoft’s first chief technology officer, founder of Intellectual Ventures, author of Modernist Cuisine and other high-tech cookbooks, and a researcher into topics ranging from dinosaur tails to near-Earth asteroids.
The polymath held forth for more than an hour on such matters and more, without slides or notes, during a Seattle meet-up presented on Aug. 7 by the area’s Hacker News fan group and Cofounders Connect. Is Myhrvold truly mad? Check out these five big ideas from the talk, and then you tell me.
