Newly Minted Genius: 2007 MacArthur Fellows

The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its latest crop of “genius grant” recipients. Each winner receives $500,000 “with no strings attached” and they can use the money to live, to fund research, or to buy a very modest condo in the Bay Area. As usual, the recipients come from a wide range of fields and backgrounds. Reviewing the bios and multimedia clips of these incredibly gifted people, I can’t help but be reminded of a great Tom Lehrer quote: “When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”