Who Would You Like to Sit Next to at Dinner?

At a book club holiday party I attended this week, we all answered the question of who we would like to sit next to at dinner (living, dead or fictional).

I chose Nikola Tesla. The reason being that I read extensively about the eccentric inventor when doing research for my international thriller, The Tesla Legacy.

He was on the autism spectrum with a number of strange quirks, one of which was to do things in multiples of three. When he went to dinner, he insisted on having three, nine or eighteen napkins served to him with his meal. I would like to see this.

But more important was his brilliant mind. He could invent things in his head and go directly from mental image to design without a blueprint. And he had a concept to generate electricity through the air or ground without wires. I would love to discuss this with him.

Who would you choose and why?