The MacArthur Foundation provides grants to some of the most talented minds in the country every year so they can pursue incredibly creative projects that could — who knows — change the world.
This year's recipients will be announced on Sept. 17, but if in the future you're hoping to get your hands on one of these fellowships, lovingly nicknamed the "MacArthur Genius Grant," some new data just released may put you on the right path.
The MacArthur Foundation recently released data that shows where recipients of the fellowship are born, where they lived at the time they received the award and how mobile they are. This is the first time the data has been compiled and made publicly available.
It turns out that an overwhelming number of fellows were born in New York, 169 of the fellows chosen from 1981 to 2013, to be precise. Other top states include California (59), Pennsylvania (52), Massachusetts (29) and Illinois (39). This makes sense because these are some of the most populous states in the country with some of the best school districts to churn out "geniuses."
However, if you look at the data by per capita, as Vox points out, these numbers turn out to be not as impressive. New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts remain in the top 10 with the most MacArthur Fellows, but they're joined by Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota due to their small populations.
Unfortunately for those from Nevada, Wyoming and Vermont, your state has not produced a MacArthur Fellow yet.
Another interesting finding from this data is that MacArthur Fellows tend to not stay in one place. They will more likely end up somewhere other than their birthplace by the time they receive their award. California is the most popular state for fellows to move to with 113 new residents, followed by Massachusetts (58), New York (28), New Jersey (16) and a tie between Virginia and Arizona (10 each).
The Vice President of the MacArthur Fellows Program Cecilia Conrad notes that innovative people tend to cluster near cultural centers and hotbeds of technological and scientific research, such as states with large cities like New York, California and Massachusetts, which may explain the mobility patterns of the fellows.
Although MacArthur Fellows must be U.S. residents or citizens to be eligible for an award, nearly a quarter of winners were born outside of the U.S.
So basically, "genius" comes from a variety of places. Who knew?
