Battling to save him from execution, Thaw's lawyers employed 10 of the country's most eminent mind doctors to claim that Thaw had been overwhelmed by the urge for retribution: years before he had even met his doe-eyed starlet wife Evelyn Nesbit, White had seduced her.
The Harvard historian Roger Owen is one of the pre-eminent minds on the modern Middle East, but even he was dumbstruck by the civil unrest sweeping the Arab world.
Rather, at 26, he is a cool young man who became a grandmaster at 13 and who dominates the world's pre-eminent mind sport, winning the world championship in 2013.
("The reality in which we live is beyond our immediate perceptions".) I think it's all about movies, the pre-eminent mind-machine of the modern age, and the desire of an older, established, long-dormant director to tap into creative (metaphoric) youth by exploring some of the same cinematic concerns that possessed modernist filmmakers like Antonioni.
Harrington is one of the smarter members of the professional golf fraternity, as well as a star pupil of Bob Rotella, the sport's pre-eminent "mind guru", so one has to believe there is an element of psychology in his public indifference.
Academic historians will be disappointed that Seymour has used few German-language sources, and concentrates on royalty, the nobility and eminent creative minds rather than on commercial travellers, sportsmen, Thomas Cook tourists, or the German waiters who were predominant in London restaurants until 1914.
So how did researchers explain the fact that so many eminent scientific minds made their major achievements earlier in their careers?
As his biographer WK Hancock wrote: Smuts's time at Cambridge had been one of outstanding success; his tutor Professor FW Maitland, himself one of the most eminent legal minds of the time, described Smuts as the most brilliant Law student he had ever taught.
The transcripts of the 2006 meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nation's pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding.
To read: In the New York Times, Binyamin Appelbaum has a devastating look at the way the Fed failed to see the coming economic crisis: The transcripts of the 2006 meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nation's pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding.
