Chester, Geoffry V.          Professor emeritus; physicist.

Feynman, Richard      (1918-1988), winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.  Feynman had colored letters and numbers.

        "When I see equations, I see the letters in colors -- I don't know why.  As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."

            Richard Feynman.  1988.  What Do You Care What Other People Think?  New York: Norton.  P. 59.
 

Griffeth, Bill    Television journalist (business and finance); host of CNBC's Power Lunch.
 
 

Morgenstern, Stephanie  actress, director, writer
 

    Around 1690, John Locke (1694/1905), in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote of a blind man who apprehended scarlet by the sound of a trumpet (Book III, Ch. 4, section 11):

“For, to hope to produce an idea of light or colour by a sound, however formed, is to expect that sounds should be visible, or colours audible; and to make the ears do the office of all the other senses. Which is all one as to say, that we might taste, smell, and see by the ears: a sort of philosophy worthy only of Sancho Panza, who had the faculty to see Dulcinea by hearsay. And therefore he that has not before received into his mind, by the proper inlet, the simple idea which any word stands for, can never come to know the signification of that word by any other words or sounds whatsoever, put together according to any rules of definition. The only way is, by applying to his senses the proper object; and so producing that idea in him, for which he has learned the name already. A studious blind man, who had mightily beat his head about visible objects, and made use of the explication of his books and friends, to understand those names of light and colours which often came in his way, bragged one day, That he now understood what scarlet signified. Upon which, his friend demanding what scarlet was? The blind man answered, It was like the sound of a trumpet. Just such an understanding of the name of any other simple idea will he have, who hopes to get it only from a definition, or other words made use of to explain it.”

This blind man was, apparently, Professor Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739), who held the Lucasian Professor chair (Newton’s chair, more recently held by Stephen Hawking) in the Mathematics Department at Cambridge from 1711 to 1739.
 

Tenberken, Sabriye      of "Braille Without Borders".
                                                                        (photo by Paul Kronenberg)
 

"Tenberken had impaired vision almost from birth, but was able to make out faces and landscapes until she was 12.  As a child in Germany, she had a particular predilection for colours, and loved painting, and when she was no longer able to decipher shapes and forms she could still use colours to identify objects. Tenberken has, indeed an intense synaesthesia.

"'As far back as I can remember,' she writes, 'numbers and words have instantly triggered colours in me ... number four, for example [is] gold. Five is light green.Nine is vermillion... Days of week, as well as months, have their colours, too.'  Her synaesthesia has persisted and been intensified, it seems,by her blindness" [from http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/blind.html ].
 

Tesla, Nikola     (1856 - 1943)

Serbian-born American inventor of the polyphase AC systems, the induction motor, fluorescent light bulbs, loudspeakers, radio, vacuum tubes, and more than 700 other major electrical devices.

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