Birthplaces of genius: Kurow, Porangahau, Ngaruawahia ...

New Zealand’s greatest son, Lord Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Prize winner and ‘‘Father of nuclear physics’’, was born in the village of Brightwater, near Nelson.

Maurice Wilkins, a Nobel Prize winner who helped elucidate the structure of DNA, was born in the even smaller east coast village of Porangahau.

A third New Zealander, Alan MacDiarmid, was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering plastics that could transmit electricity. He was born in Masterton.

Small provincial towns have generated these guys as well as all our other world-shaping scientists. Beatrice Tinsley’s father was mayor of New Plymouth. Her astronomical interests took her to Canterbury then to American universities where her researches led to a profound understanding of the evolution of galaxies and their constituent chemical elements. In 1978, Beatrice (1941-81) was appointed professor of astronomy at Yale University.

Born in Ngaruawahia, Allan Wilson (1934-91) became professor of biochemistry at Berkeley University, California, where he was first to calibrate a molecular clock that ticks away in DNA, calculated how we evolved away from apes 6 million years ago, and how we all had a common ancestor some 120,000 years ago.

Mathematician Sir Vaughan Jones was born in Gisborne in 1952 and was appointed professor of maths at Berkeley in 1986. There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics. The equivalent is the Field Medal, which Vaughan-Jones won for his work on von Neumann algebras and knot theory.

In 1934, Roy Kerr was born in the small South Island town of Kurow, near Oamaru. He lost his mother at age 3 and was brought up by foster parents on a farm while his father was away at the war. Returning from World War II, Roy’s father managed to get his boy into Christchurch’s St Andrews College, as he had served under a former headmaster during the war.

Kerr did brilliantly at high school and soon found his way to Canterbury, then Cambridge universities. While teaching maths at the University of Texas, Kerr developed a spinning black hole solution to Einstein’s gravitational field equations, predicting the existence of black holes long before any were discovered.

In a set of equations, our mathematician outlined his theories at a conference on relativistic astrophysics in Texas in 1962. They have become known as the ‘‘Kerr Metric’’ and have defined and underpinned all theories and observations about black holes ever since.

Earlier this month, three American physicists won the Nobel Prize for detecting gravity waves for the first time. All three acknowledge that Roy Kerr’s old metric underpinned their gravitational discoveries.

In this month’s Nature journal, some 14 million scientific papers published over recent years have been analysed. The careers and travels of all the scientists was followed, and their work graded from their least to most influential.

The authors conclude that if you want to make a worldchanging scientific discovery, be born in a remote place but do your research in another country.