Main articles: List of autistic people and People speculated to have been autistic
AS is sometimes viewed as a syndrome with both advantages and disadvantages,
[101] and notable adults with AS or autism have achieved success in their fields. Prominent AS-diagnosed individuals include
Nobel Prize-winning economist
Vernon Smith,
[102] electropop rocker
Gary Numan,
[103] Vines frontman
Craig Nicholls[104] and
Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of
Pokémon.
[105] Colorado State University professor and author
Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism at a young age, and has used her autism to her advantage in her profession as an animal behaviorist specializing in livestock handling.
[106][107]
The syndrome was in the news in 2007 because of the suicide of Nikki Bacharach, the only child of the songwriter
Burt Bacharach and his former wife,
Angie Dickinson. The younger Bacharach had AS. A month later,
Daniel Tammet, the subject of the television documentary
Brainman, published
Born On a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (Free Press), a memoir of his life with AS, and was profiled in
The New York Times.
[108]
Some AS researchers speculate that well-known figures, including
Jeremy Bentham,
[109] Albert Einstein,
Isaac Newton,
[110] Glenn Gould[111] and
Ludwig Wittgenstein[112] had AS because they showed some AS-related tendencies or behaviors, such as intense interest in one subject, and/or social problems.
[113][114] These speculative diagnoses, especially posthumous ones, remain controversial, as they work only from biographical information and sometimes ignore documented traits that would indicate against Asperger syndrome.
[110] Autistic-rights activists use such speculative diagnoses to argue that it would be a loss to society if autism were cured.
[115]
some interesting lists, of people, and yeah as amazing as many of the people that are listed, there are the ones who have major problems, one that i can say can be beyond frustrating
