Lecture Date: March 13, 2025
The Coldwell Banker Elite Lecture
Bulent’s new book, Beyond Genius, is more ambitious than his earlier books on Leonardo da Vinci. Positing that genius comes in degrees, from “ordinary” to “magician” to “transformative,” he examines the internal and external conditions that produced hundreds of extraordinarily brilliant men and women. Ultimately, he makes the main focus of the book a handful of transformative geniuses—Leonardo, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and Einstein—two pure artists, two pure scientists, and one quintessential polymath who straddles the cultures of both the arts and the sciences. Walter Isaacson, who wrote a blurb for Beyond Genius, declared it, “A Triumph!”
Speaker: Bulent Atalay
Scientist, artist, author, Bulent Atalay has been described by NPR, PBS, and the Washington Post as a “Modern Renaissance Man.” Aside from his technical works in mathematical physics, which he estimates roughly 18 creatures in the universe have read, he has written three books for the intelligent laymen about the intersection of the arts and sciences that have become bestsellers. Leonardo da Vinci was the focal point in the first two: “Math and the Mona Lisa,” (Smithsonian Books, 2004), appearing in 14 languages; and Leonardo’s Universe (National Geographic Books, 2009) declared, “One of ten must-have books,” by the Britannica. His friend and former student at Mary Washington Keith Wamsley served as a co-author on Leonardo’s Universe and unofficial copy editor on the other two.
Born in Ankara Turkey, Bulent received his education in England and the United States. His training, BS, MA, MS, and Ph.D. in theoretical physics, is distilled from work at Georgetown, Cal-Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His professorship of 43 years at Mary Washington overlapped three decades with his adjunct professorship at UVA. Long before his retirement from Mary Washington in 2009, he was traveling around the world lecturing at academic institutions, and on-board cruise ships on his “A-subjects,” art, archaeology, astrophysics, and atomic physics, confessing he knows much less about the “B-subjects,” business, banking, biology, and botany. He has given lectures at Caltech, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Oxford, NASA, NIST, NIH, the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society, and the World Bank. With his wife Carol Jean, MWC ‘65, he has two grown children and six grandchildren.