Amos Eaton conducted an experiment to establish an all-female school in Troy, NY in late 1824, but his experiment went horribly wrong and what escaped from his lab was an engineering school that was destined to become all-male as surely as the Fourier transform decomposes functions into a frequency spectrum.

In 2012, I decided to try to learn MIT's 4-year undergraduate computer science curriculum in 12 months, without taking any classes. I was successful in passing the final exams for 33 classes and completing the required programming projects. You can view my TEDx Talk regarding the challenge, see links to all the free material I used, and see all the exams and projects I posted.