The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Again, Poincaré is in a class by himself. I recall my father recommending Poincaré’s essays, not just for their scientific content, but for the quality of his French prose. The grand master wrote these wonders as serialized articles and composed them like extemporaneous speeches. As in every masterpiece, you see a mixture of repetitions, digressions, everything a “me too” editor with a prepackaged mind would condemn—but these make his text even more readable owing to an iron consistency of thought. Poincaré became a prolific essayist in his thirties. He seemed in a hurry and died prematurely, at fifty-eight; he was in such a rush that he did not bother correcting typos and grammatical errors in his text, even after spotting them, since he found doing so a gross misuse of his time. They no longer make geniuses like that—or they no longer let them write in their own way.