“The only thing that’s worse than ‘bad’ is ‘boring,’” critiques Sydney Brenner, a founder of molecular biology who shared a Nobel Prize for his achievements in 2002. At age 84, he keeps traveling the world, opening up new fields of research and stimulating ideas. Here's how.

In one way, Ezra Newman is the opposite of Stephen Hawking, another genius physicist. Unlike Hawking, who is great at attracting attention, Newman is great at deflecting it. Newman is unassuming, but boy is he influential. Like the black holes he studies, he gets noticed through his effects on his surroundings.

Astrophysicist Jesse Greenstein was the first to correctly describe the nature of quasars, co-discovered cosmic radio noise emanating from our galaxy and proved that stars in globular clusters have fewer heavy elements and thus predate the sun. As a boss, though, Greenstein was perhaps even more stellar.

Until his death in 2006, economist Milton Friedman kept up with opposing points of view, a practice being lost today as people find it increasingly easier to retreat into communities of interest reflecting only their own entrenched opinions. By contrast, Friedman read a range of material from conservative to liberal. “It seems to me more important to read stuff you disagree with than to read stuff you agree with,” he said.

Having written best-sellers about the origin of the universe and the meaning of time, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is arguably one of the world’s most famous scientists. Yet, he’s never won a Nobel Prize. Why?