There's something magical about diving into personal notebooks of others. The beauty of handwriting styles, the tell-tale signs of individual thought patterns, and doodles penned down out of sheer boredom or serious cognition. I think the way one's notepad looks like offers an interesting glimpse into their unique approach to processing information. Eg. the person with neat, well-arranged notes is probably a linear thinker. One with seemingly disorganised notes, possibly more creatively inclined.

There are some great online repos where one can find scanned copies of the notepads / notebooks of some of the greats. For fun I dug into a few of them, and found scanned pages of the likes of Feynman, Ramanujan, Darwin, Einstein, Newton, Picasso, Da Vinci and others. Each one had their own style, serving as a reflective a pool, casting back glimpses of their individual way of thinking and internal dialogue—their mind made visible on paper. A fascinating exercise.

Personally, I loved Feynman's notepads, a blend of childlike curiosity and creativity (the cover image for this post). His pages were covered with doodles and formulas showcasing this brilliance. In contrast, Da Vinci's notebooks were pure intricate beauty. Every page was a testament to a restless mind, filled with obsessively detailed sketches, organised and not scattered.

Da Vinci's Notebook

Darwin would cross write to conserve paper.