New research by stastician David Banks has shown that geniuses come in clusters. Examples show ancient Greece which was filled with geniuses such as Herodotus, Plato, Socrates, Thucydides, and Aristophanes who pretty much created Western Civilization and yet all lived in Greece at basically the same time. Likewise, Michaelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci, Botticelli, and Donatello are all brilliant artists in Florence who lived basically around the same half sentury. Coincidence? Probably not.

Similarities of the places show that each was a crossroads of their time, with a wide mixing of all types of people and each encouraged education in it's citizens. Elizabithean England made an effort to educate all middle class males- which is why Shakesphere the son of an illiterate worker managed to learn Latin- and this resulted in an outporing of knowledge and creativity. The United States is great at generating geniuses... our geniuses just happen to be athletic in nature. We have an antire system in place for athletes, from the Little League to the Majors, and our culture encourages them to an almost fanatic degree withe huge salaries as they get older and parents willing to drive them to practice at a younger age.

We do have our fair share of brilliance, but my point is we can bring it to a much larger scale if we nurture this brilliance from a young age. Science fairs, hackathons, and math contests are a great step forward but we need to notch it up another degree if we want to remain competitve with a math loving East. In a world where human capital has become more valued than ever, we need to educate our citizens to become more and more useful to society as a whole.