Born in 1903, Oleg Vladimirovich Losev invented LEDs decades before everybody else (in the 1920s). “Unknown and uncelebrated, this should’ve been the beginning of the photonic telecommunications revolution.”
But nobody cared. He was a lonely, broke self-taught nerd with no co-authors. He wrote to Einstein but didn’t get a reply. He died of starvation at the siege of Leningrad in 1942, at a sadly young 38 years of age.
Let’s create an accessible, informal, global nerd network that makes it easy for nerds like Losev to reach out to someone and get rerouted to wherever they need to go. If there’s a 1% shot of finding someone who advances some domain by 20 years, that’s a gift to humanity, and that’s worth doing.
More about Losev:
- An engineer tragically ahead of his time, (hackaday.com, 2017)
- Losev’s diodes (chemistryworld.com, 2021)
See also:
- Ramanujan
- Vavilov