Projective geometry

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was born in Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrant farmers, earned a doctorate in philosophy at Yale and then, unable to find work, spent seven years on his family's farm reading. At the University of Chicago he published The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which made him famous.

An eccentric teacher and a sharp, ironic writer, he moved from university to university and spent his career criticising business culture and wasteful consumption. He died in August 1929, a few months before the stock market crash that seemed to prove him right.