I actually think the tools and environment are more important that the genius.
There are thousands, maybe millions of people with genius-level intellect, all capable of being the next Leonardo or Einstein. Out of them only a small fraction grew up in the right environment, usually wealthy families, but that's still a lot of people. The next, and I think most important requirement are the tool needed to make the discovery, or even just to know that a discovery is to be made.
For example, if you don't have the tools needed to notice that the speed of light isn't infinite, special relativity makes no sense. General relativity requires even more tricky measurement, in fact it didn't came long after people noticed something was wrong with Newtonian mechanics.
Tools are in the general sense. Physical object like a computer or a good telescope, manufacturing techniques and even maths, think of the "shoulders of giants" thing.
So it would be more like giving the graphing calculator the genius it needs rather than going back in time and giving the genius a graphing calculator.
There are thousands, maybe millions of people with genius-level intellect, all capable of being the next Leonardo or Einstein. Out of them only a small fraction grew up in the right environment, usually wealthy families, but that's still a lot of people. The next, and I think most important requirement are the tool needed to make the discovery, or even just to know that a discovery is to be made.
For example, if you don't have the tools needed to notice that the speed of light isn't infinite, special relativity makes no sense. General relativity requires even more tricky measurement, in fact it didn't came long after people noticed something was wrong with Newtonian mechanics.
Tools are in the general sense. Physical object like a computer or a good telescope, manufacturing techniques and even maths, think of the "shoulders of giants" thing.
So it would be more like giving the graphing calculator the genius it needs rather than going back in time and giving the genius a graphing calculator.