Born on a Blue Day (2007)

With all due respect to Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and any living Nobel laureates, the most remarkable mind on the planet just might belong to 27-year-old Daniel Tammet. One of only a handful of autistic savants (like Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man), he's been gifted with a phenomenal facility in languages as well as math (memorizing pi to more than 22,000 places). Also born with a rare neurogical condition called synesthesia, he perceives numbers and letters as shapes and colors. Tammet displays a surprising level of sensitivity — and a refreshing lack of sentimentality — in Born on a Blue Day, a book that inspires even as it astonishes.

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