a picture in which a dot is the lobe of a man's ear

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Rhythm and Discernment (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Bennard B. Perlman, The Golden Age of American Illustration: F.R. Gruger and His Circle. Westport CT: North Light Publishers, 1977, p. 294—

The Composition Class instructor, Henry J. Thouron, sought to stimulate the creativity of his students. He would draw a rectangular area, then locate within it a few freehand lines and a dot. “Now I want a picture where this dot is the lobe of a man's ear and these lines are incorporated,” he would advise. All of the elements would have to become part of the composition; that was the challenge. Each student then evolved an original picture where the design was controlled by the novice artist, rather than by happenstance.

Promotional Poster | Ashley Fisher

Promotional poster (2013) © Ashley Fisher

Above Proposed promotional poster for the College of Humanities, Arts and Sciences (CHAS) at the University of Northern Iowa, by graphic design student Ashley Fisher (2013).

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Michael Wertheimer, "Musings of Max Wertheimer's Octogenarian Son" in Gestalt Theory. Vol 35 No 2 (2013), p. 118 (recalling a story told by his father)—

Part of the duty of certain officials in the Ministry of Education in the old Austrian empire was to make periodic inspections of the schools. An inspector arrives at a village schoolroom, and at the end of the hour of observing the class, he stands up and says, "I am happy to see you children doing so well in your studies. But before I leave, there is one question I would like to ask: How many hairs does a horse have?" To the astonishment of both teacher and inspector, a little nine-year-old boy raises his hand. He stands up and says, "The horse has 543,871,962 hairs." Bewildered, the inspector asks, "And how do you know that this is the correct number?" The boy replies, "If you don't believe me, you can count them yourself." The inspector laughs out loud, thoroughly enjoying the boy's remark. As the teacher escorts the inspector to the door, the inspector says, "What an amusing story! I must tell it to my colleagues when I return to Vienna. They enjoy nothing better than a good joke." And with that he takes his leave.

A year later the inspector is back again at the village school for his annual visit. The teacher asks the inspector how his colleagues liked the story of the horse and the number of hairs. The inspector, a bit chagrined, says, "You know, I was really eager to tell the story—and a fine story it is—but, you see, I couldn't. When I got back to Vienna, I couldn't for the life of me remember the number of hairs."

Norbert Wiener Warning System

Above A portrait photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt of Norbert Wiener in his MIT classroom, first published in Life magazine in 1956.

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Recently I have been reading about the tortured life of the founder of cybernetics, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age (New York: Basic Books, 2005). A famous child prodigy referred to in news reports as "the most remarkable boy in the world" (he knew the alphabet at eighteen months, began reading at three, and could recite in Greek and Latin at age five), he made momentous discoveries in his later life (the authors describe him as "the father of the information age") but he paid an agonizing price in social maladjustment and neurosis. In this biography, the authors recount the reactions of some of his colleagues to the adult Professor Wiener—

Wiener walked tirelessly around Tech [MIT] during those eventful years, and his unannounced drop-ins evoked a mixed response from his colleagues. [One of them] Jerome Wiesner…remembered Wiener's "daily visits around the Institute from office to office and his conversation that always began with 'How's it going?' He never waited for the answer before sailing into his latest idea."…

[Some people dreaded his visits.] One group of engineers resented Wiener's intrusions and devised an extreme countermeasure they called their "Wiener Early Warning System." [Steve J.] Heims reported that "they would contrive to place a man where he could see Wiener coming. He would alert the others, who would then scatter in all directions, even hiding in the men's room." Fagi Levinson knew of one colleague who hid under his desk when he saw Wiener coming.…"

I suspect that Wiener as a child prodigy was the inspiration for the encounter with the "boy genius" and his parents in Woody Allen's film Radio Days.