There is something wonderful in human connections of friendship, which somehow pushes the boundaries of individual limits and allows people to become greater than the sum of their individualities. Sometimes, these connections wield the power to change, or at least, influence the course of human history, in ways that we usually do not anticipate.
Such friendships are rare but they exist with their full intensity, in a way that changes the world.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman
Known for their seminal work in mathematical psychology, these two Israelis had such intense friendship that people, including themselves, compared their friendship to marriage. Together, these social scientists discovered cognitive biases that keep humans from thinking rationally. The two friends established that humans were not intuitive rational thinkers and they proved that errors made by humans were predictable. For their revolutionary work, Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. Tversky could not share the Nobel because he had died six years ago and the prize is not awarded posthumously.
Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony
In the early 19th century America, women were not allowed to vote, and they did not have a voice. Women who spoke up were legally permitted to be physically punished by their spouses. In those times, Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony ran a women’s only newspaper — The Revolution. While Anthony was arrested leading the suffrage movement and showed herself willing to go to jail for women’s rights, Stanton was considered a thinker and writer who could express what Anthony saw and felt. Their movement outlived them and resulted in the 19th amendment — voting rights to women.
Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel
One grappling with the fundamental nature of reality while the other engaging with the unprovability of truth, these both scientists had escaped Nazi Germany as refugees and shared time together at Princeton University. While their friendship is not as intensely talked about, they both complemented each other in a way that changed the fundamental direction of science. By providing a perfect solution to Einstein’s General Relativity field equations, which described the geometry of spacetime in relation to the distribution of matter in it, Godel made Einstein’s geometry of spacetime complete.
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