This thread happened to be next to Hue Hefner, Living every man’s dream so I have to ask didn’t Newton die a virgin. How smart is that?
Hah! I just finished this book yesterday, and am going to pick up The Confusion very soon to continue the story.
For what that book may be counted (and as much as I love Stephenson’s writing, I get the feeling he’s not above taking serious liberties), Liebniz came away in my mind as a much smarter chap in Quicksilver than Newton, just always a step slower in producing results and without the institutional backing to pimp him as the greatest.
As nobody has yet mentioned Thomas Edison, who gave us electric light, recorded music, and recorded film, among his list of 1093 patents (though not the electric hammer), I have to throw him into the mix.
Huh.
No wimmen mentioned.
I don’t think Marilyn Von Savant counts. She hasn’t really given the world anything other than answers to IQ questions in USA today.
Incidentally, that was the book I read after I finished Stephenson’s Baroque cycle. I found it very enjoyable, but a little too brief. I would have liked to see more of Newton’s correspondence and more emphasis on Newton’s place in the history of ideas.
Well, at the end of the day, you learn F=MA in schools and not monadology.
Well, Edison said his own work was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Of course, Nikola Tesla said maybe if Edison was smarter he wouldn’t have to sweat so much. 
Tesla is another good canidate for smartest person ever - without him, we wouldn’t have 1920’s style “Death Rays.” 
I forgot that I have a copy of: “The 100: a ranking of the most influential persons in history”
It’s a 556 pager written by Michael H. Hart, and came out in 1978.
Here’s his top 10:
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Muhammad (I’m too worn out from work to lay out the author’s dumb reasoning as to why he puts this guy at number 1, sorry.)
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Isaac Newton
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Jesus Christ (Why not number one? Again, too tired to write out author’s reasons.)
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Budda
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Confucius
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St. Paul
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Ts’ai Lun
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Johann Gutenberg
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Christopher Columbus
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Albert Einstein
Hitler is at #39 and someone named Mahavira comes in last on this guy’s list at 100. Could not find the great Leonardo on it, though it may be there.
Perhaps someone can Google this Hart fellow’s list and link all the names, yes?
Anyway, this list isn’t quite the same as the question I asked, but it is better perhaps in that it’s more practical to consider what people have actually done.
I’m not sure I’d even consider Edison a genius, let alone in the running as the smartest person ever. He seemed to be a very sharp guy, with some great ideas, and so hard-working that he tried so many things to find a lot of ways to make things work.
Newton also invented the reflecting telescope, which is still used today.
And by the way, it’s clear that the gods of truth are weighing in on Newton as being the greatest, as while else would there be such synchronicity via an advertisement at the bottom of this thread linking to Newton’s Cradle???
Because those are Google ads, which are keyed off the words appearing on this page.
GrahamWellington != Genius
I’ve heard that men tend to dominate the extreme ends of the IQ spectrum; so that, while the average IQ is the same for men and women, the supergeniuses and the idiots are overwhelmingly male.
Other theories I’ve heard are that men’s brains are better suited for concentrating exclusively one on area (like music or mathematics—hence, more likely to do genius-level work in that area) while women are better multitaskers; and, of course, that historically women have had less opportunity to become educated and to show how smart they are.
Thanks Kid_A,
IMHO the author loses credibility for not having Leo on the list.
Isn’t it wonderful that we learn something every day!
I think this is just a symptom of the real problem in threads like this: We can only go by the famous ones. For most of history, women had very little opportunity to make their mark, so even if there were many very smart women, we wouldn’t have heard of them. In all liklihood, the smartest person who ever lived was born into extreme poverty and died before the age of ten. OK, probably es parents told everyone about how their kid was smart, but that’s not near enough time for anyone outside of the family or maybe village to have heard of em.
But to do like everyone else in the thread and name a famous person, I’ll either go with Archimedes or Mendel. Archimedes is easy enough to explain: He made great contributions to mathematics, physics, and engineering, far before his time. You want to credit Tesla with death rays? The evidence is better for Archimedes’ one, a few millenia earlier. Give Newton credit for calculus? Archimedes would have had it, given a natural lifetime. And great though he was, there’s no evidence that Leonardo ever ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, which has to count for something.
Mendel is less obvious, but I think he still deserves a mention, despite only leaving his mark in only one field. Why? Because alone among great scientists, to my knowledge, he did not stand on the shoulders of giants. Everything that was known about genetics before him was known into antiquity, and amounted to vague truisms like “People mostly resemble their kinsfolk”. But nobody before him put all the pieces together, and worked out why organisms share some traits with some kinsfolk, but not all.
My sentiment exactly. He may have been very, very smart, but he never experienced making love with a woman and that’s just plain stupid.
My Dad always told me he thought the smartest person ever was Copernicus, and it always brought a chuckle to him because Copernicus was Polish.
Copernicus was pretty bright though. My Dad, bright but not so funny… :rolleyes:
Off to IMHO!
Re Leonardo Da Vinci. A smart and talented guy but outside of art and sclupture how historically influential was he? I get the impression that most of his research was hidden untill recently.
It’s pretty hard to determine IQ without actually being able to test these famous, supersmart but inconveniently dead people. Even if you could, there would be so many variables about how their intelligence was applied, under what sort of social strictures they lived, etc.
That said… I’d vote for da Vinci. An amazingly smart, insightful and multitalented guy, well ahead of his time.
Thomas Jefferson was pretty damned smart, too (but, for various reasons, is not a Framer I admire), as was **Benjamin Franklin ** (whom I *do * admire, a lot).
And many of those are wrong. Nor is Ms. vos Savant likely to be remembered in any 22nd Century person’s list of “Great Achievers of the XXth Century.”
Indeed. One wonders how many Srinivasa Ramanujans have come and passed without notice in the remote corners of the world. Hence the preponderance of geniuses in Europe and Eastern Asia in recorded history.
And accomplishment is only a loose measure of correlation with intelligence, as measured in terms of IQ. That begs the question of exactly what IQ is an accurate measure of, other than one’s ability to perform well on IQ tests, but assigning numbers in the 150+ range at historical figures is like tossing darts. The lives and works of the ancient scholars are so fragmentary and filtered through translation and myth that we can only guess at how much of their work is autonomous and unique and how much of it is just an extension of those who came before.
Gould makes a good argument in The Mismeasure of Man against the most common uses of the term “intelligence”, and Stephen Pinker addresses the notion of genius and innate intelligence in How The Mind Works with the concusion that geniuses are smart not because they have smarter brains in any general sense but because they are “wonks”; that is, they tend to focus and spend a lot of time studying, thinking about, and focusing their attention upon the salient underlying themes or principles of their field of interest, creating a fully integrated understanding of the knowledge of their field.
If I was going to pick a name, I’d stab out at Archimedes or Plato, each having been a prime formative mover of modern science and mathematics for the former, and philosophy, political theory, and cosmology for the later. But then I’d be leaving out Lao Tse, James Clark Maxwell, Aristotle, Max Planck, Charles Darwin, Werner Heisenberg…the list continues ad infinium (or long enough to be terminally boring, anyway).
Stranger