> What does a degree have to do with brains?
Exactly!!!
My favorite scientist of all time has always been Oliver Heaviside.
Home schooled, self educated and too poor to attend college, he taught himself the basics of electrical engineering. He invented the Laplace Transform (got no credit); invented transmission lines equations and corrected Maxwell’s paper on electromagnetic field theory (Einstein, intellectual snob that he was, would not recognize his genius and would not credit him with electromagnetic field theory and would only refer to it as Maxwell’s equations, because Heaviside did not have a college degree.)
Degrees are overrated.
Holy smokes, I thought I was the only guy alive who knew who Oliver Heaviside was! My old man was an EE who got his degree in the 50s and when I went through my own EE education in the late 80s I tried to use his old books as references. However they were really different. Lots of "operational calculus" which was what they called using transforms to solve diff EQs algebraicly (i.e. as we do with Laplace transforms) but the transforms themselves were different. One was the "Heaviside transform". It wasn't the same as a Laplace transform though. I think he pioneered the field of linear systems analysis as EEs today know it, using transforms and transfer functions to solve complex diff EQs easily and indeed, he gets no credit because for fifty years mathematicians rolled their eyes and considered that "not real math".
One of his books had some biographical sketches of some of the forgotten men who basically invented electrical engineering including Heaviside and Steinmetz. Brilliant guys who made our modern world possible, but nobody knows who they are.