As anyone who has heard his recent solo work can tell you, urban producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley's genius functions intermittently, but on a good day, he is almost uniquely capable of balancing ineffable pop nous with an intuitive avant-garde sensibility.
Many scholars believe that genius is a function of both heredity and environment.
Britain, he says, has the wrong sort of capitalism, which it probably does – except that the one point on which the hard left and the liberal right agree is that capitalism's genius is a function of its global reach.
The sentiment echoes persistent myths regarding creativity, such as psychologist Harvey Lehman's 1953 conclusion that "the genius does not function equally well throughout the years of adulthood.
It is Jim Carrey, venting his highly ambitious, slightly crazed genius while also functioning as a rubbery object that gives the image a life of its own.
Zaillian's script, they wrote, featured the seminal baseball statistical genius Bill James, who "functioned as a Greek chorus for the film, offering wry, Yoda-like explanations about the complexity of the game".
After all, if genius were simply a function of the amount of data at your fingertips, then every smartphone owner would be another Einstein.
Genius does not keep functioning successfully without occasional ruthlessness.
He sees himself as an artist, with the duty to follow the dictates of his genius, at the expense of function, context or logic in the face of the Philistine opposition of a soulless, venal world.
By contrast, the genius has a memory that functions normally.
