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Comment by _reality_check_ | Hacker News Reader

> From random readings, it appears that great musicians, scientists, artists live not only during the same era, but usually very close to one another.

I'm highly skeptical of this claim. Can you back it up?

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There are several well-documented examples throughout history: Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century[1], and the Florence Renaissance during the fifteenth century.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Insight-Understand-Unconscious...

I'm on my way out and maybe someone else can chime in with more relevant references, but as a starting point, this is something studied at least in business/economics. Wouldn't surprise me to find something similar for the arts/sciences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster

<Edit>Leave your email in your profile, and after doing some research I will send you info. This is a very good question.</Edit>

Sorry for the late reply. I picked up a coffee table book titled "100 of the World's Most Beautiful Paintings," reading through it, I would quickly Google artists, and found a few lived close to each other and during the same era. I would have to go through it again, but surely I will add it here once I do.

Something more obvious would be Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle.

Also Einstein's influential TOR work on the Atomic bomb when highly capable scientists advanced the same work in the United states at the same time.

More relevant reading: Where Good Ideas Come From [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZK58TA?btkr=1]

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