Walter Isaacson
About Walter Isaacson
“We had a wonderful experience with Walter. He delivered an exceptional keynote, and we have received positive feedback regarding the topic, content and overall delivery.”
Speech topics
Additional Speech Topics:
Ben Franklin and America's Virtues
Einstein - His Life and Universe
The Media and American Culture
Speaking videos
Books by Walter Isaacson
“The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” (2025)
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
“Elon Musk” (2023)
Elon Musk
“The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race” (2022)
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
“Leonardo da Vinci” (2017)
The #1 New York Times bestseller“A powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life...a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it.” —The New Yorker“Vigorous, insightful.” —The Washington Post“A masterpiece.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Luminous.” —The Daily BeastHe was history’s most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography.Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions.Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
“Steve Jobs” (2013)
Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
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