Bulent Atalay spent more than four decades teaching physics at the University of Mary Washington. On the side, he fed a passion for the arts that had possessed him from an early age.
“As a child growing up in Turkey and England, I drew and painted everything I could get ahold of,” said Atalay, whose books of lithographs created in the 1970s can be found in the White House, Buckingham Palace and the Smithsonian. But he also discovered a penchant for numbers, equations and things mathematical, in his high school days and during his training in physics in college and graduate school.
Audience members will learn more when he speaks this week as part of the William B. Crawley Great Lives Lecture Series. Atalay’s presentation – the Coldwell Banker Elite Lecture, focusing on his latest book, Beyond Genius – is scheduled for George Washington Hall’s Dodd Auditorium on Thursday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m. It’s the latest installment of the series’ 22nd season, which continues for free most Tuesdays and Thursdays through April 3.
“Genius, like all human qualities, comes in degrees,” Atalay said during a Zoom interview from his home office, adorned with blown-up covers of his first book, 2004’s Math and the Mona Lisa. That book examines the numbers, patterns and symmetries Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci used to create his own paintings. Published in 14 languages, the work preceded Atalay’s Leonardo’s Universe, an illustration-filled, coffee table book published in 2009 by National Geographic, and co-authored with friend and former UMW graduate student Keith Wamsley ’03.
Beyond Genius: A Journey Through the Characteristics and Legacies of Transformative Minds is Atalay’s most ambitious book on the intersection of the arts and sciences. Published by Pegasus Books in November 2023, it, too, examines da Vinci but includes a handful of other great minds – Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Ludwig van Beethoven and William Shakespeare. “Each, in entirely defining his respective field, is far more influential than ‘the ordinary genius,’ such as a Nobel Prize winner,” Atalay said.
While the prodigies’ paths vary wildly, Beyond Genius traces the internal and external conditions that applied to each one, along with personal characteristics and traits, to reveal commonalities. “They all leapt effortlessly from one monumental achievement to another,” the author found. “They all operated largely on intuition, communed more readily with nature than others could, exhibited an aversion to authority and displayed their incredible talents by the time they were in their early teens.”
Atalay, borrowing from the ancient Roman philosopher and poet Seneca, writing: “They each also possessed ‘a tincture of lunacy,’ a necessary ingredient for genius.” Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote a blurb for Beyond Genius, calling it “A triumph.” Oxford University named it its “Alumni Book of the Month.”
The author became thoroughly acquainted with da Vinci’s artistic works – and his far less known scientific works – while writing his first two books. “Only a part-time artist, he created the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, the two most famous works in the history of art,” Atalay said. “But the man described as ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history,’ had an unbelievable scientific insight few have known about.”
In his years as a professor of physics at Mary Washington (1966-2009) and adjunct professor of math at UVA (1971-2006), he frequently focused on the discoveries of Newton and Einstein. In writing his new book, he said, he had to delve much deeper into the backgrounds and works of artistic creators Shakespeare and Beethoven.
Atalay’s training in theoretical physics is distilled from his studies at Georgetown, Cal-Berkeley, Princeton and Oxford. “But UMW is ultimately home,” he said. “It’s where I taught generations of students and the single institution to which I feel the greatest sense of loyalty.”
For more information about Atalay’s lecture on Thursday, March 13, along with other remaining presentations, visit the Great Lives lecture series webpage.
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