Not including Jesus (because He’s God, 1/3rd of the Holy Trinity) or myself (because I AM the most smart, though I just can’t prove it:-), I’d have to say Newton was the smartest of 'em all. And who’s ever in second comes in at a very distant second.
And sooooooo what are YOUR thoughts? 
Not sure it should be counted against him, but Newton was big into astrology and alchemy. A genius, but still a man of his times, I guess.
According to this website:
http://www.aceviper.net/aceviper_net/ace_intelligence/aceviper_famous_people_iq_list/aceviper_famous_people_iq_list.html
Newton is ranked with a 190 IQ.
People listed with 200 or higher IQ’s are:
Emanuel **Swedenborg ** Sweden 205
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Germany 205
Hugo **Grotius ** Writer Holland 200
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Germany 210
John Stuart **Mill ** Universal Genius England 200
Kim **Ung-Yong ** Korea 200
Leonardo da Vinci Universal Genius Italy 220
Sir Francis Galton Scientist & doctor England 200
Thomas Wolsey Politician England 200
William James Sidis USA 200
(I have no idea why they made that list in alphabetical order by first name)
Anyway, I have heard that **William James Sidis **may have been the smartest person who ever lived. (No doubt, other Dopers will offer their choices).
Aristotle. Invented logic. 'Nuff said.
What about Archimedes? Invented freakin’ calculus!! That stuff is hard.
Those IQ’s are just made up. Since they are giving exact scores, they have to be referring to the results of a standard IQ test. Even if the guesser is still assigning a number based on research about those people it still doesn’t work.
We can’t measure IQ’s that high at all. An IQ of 200 is 6.7 standard deviations above the mean. The chance of someone scoring that high is less than the number of people that have ever lived and yet your list shows many of them.
It is absurd to not only make up scores like that for historical people and yet differentiate them with relatively small point spreads. Once you get to 1 chance in infinity, it doesn’t really matter if one person has more infinities than the others.
Dropping in to cast my vote for da Vinci.
'Cept for Aristotle.
He was also fiery religious, virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, and generally batshit crazy in many ways, though his brilliance was indeed spooky. (Rather like John Nash, a prick of a fellow but “a beautiful mind” that can do things most simply cannot.)
Newton was also a lifelong virgin. On his deathbed he was very proud of the fact he was going to die “innocent”. He’s a major side character in the novel Quicksilver, a very heavy book that I would recommend to anybody who has an interest in Newton, his times, or just likes incredibly imaginative yet super well researched historical fiction. (His hatred of Leibniz is a major point in the book.)
While Newton was definitely brilliant, I’d probably go with Eratosthenes (even though he was called Beta, “second best at everything”, in his lifetime) or, of course, Rosie O’Donnell. Benjamin Franklin, while he lacked Newton’s almost pathological insight and concentration on mathematics, was no slouch either, particularly in his ability to practicalize his observations (the stove, the lightning rod, the postal service, etc.).
Sampiro, have you read Isaac Newton by James Gleick?
Hmm my cat’s name is Spooky. Maybe I really am up their with Newton.
I read a bio of Newton several years ago titled Never at Rest, by Richard Westfall. And he never made any mention at all of Newton being anti-semetic; only that he decided to learn Hebrew to gain a better understanding of the Bible.
Madonna 140??? God! I must then be at least at around 180!
Also, what kind of list such as this would say that Newton was a scientist and yet not also list him as a (TOP!) mathematician?
Interesting list just the same, thanks!
I usually toss a Rene Descartes or an Emmanual Kant into the mix, just to spice things up a bit.
High School Choir Director INSISTED that the smartest person ever was Mozart.
:rolleyes:
Btw, if any of you remember a SNL skit with Joe Piscopo playing a goateed choir director, I swear that the skit was about that man- down to the physical resemblence.
And another vote for da Vinci.
Not only that, they would have had to have taken the same IQ tests, since scoring is not standardized.
Off the top of my head, I’d go for Leonardo Da Vinci - excellence across multiple, unrelated fields is a strong qualifier, in my book. Of course there might be someone who did it better than him, but he’s the one that springs immediately to mind.
People, aren’t we forgetting our raison d’etre, Cecil Adams?
:eek:
Just this morning I read this interesting article about how one form of heart surgery has been greatly improved following a surgeon’s study of a few of Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings.
Another vote for Da Vinci here!
Any one of Newton’s three major discoveries (laws of motion; calculus; laws of optics) would have made him a scientific immortal.
The fact that he believed in some really stupid and/or crazy things doesn’t diminish this. It merely reminds us that human progress is a spotty, haphazard thing – even geniuses can be wrong half of the time, especially when looked back at hundreds of years later.
The fact that he was a vain, snotty, egocentric jerk merely reminds us that geniuses can be those things too.