Hell on earth for a brilliant innovator is spelled s-c-h-o-o-l. . . . [Inventor] Dean Kamen . . . found himself at odds with his public-school teachers in New York's Long Island because he noted that his wrong answers weren't really wrong. For instance, when asked to select the word that didn't belong to the set "add, subtract, multiply, increase," Kamen might choose "add" because all the others had eight letters.

Steven Levy

About Steven Levy

Portrait of Steven Levy

Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and editor at large for Wired who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicles the early days of the...