There are geniuses, and there are entrepreneurs who find ways to harness the output of geniuses.
Remember, intellectual property is rarely the property of an intellectual. More likely, it is the property of investing shareholders, whose interests are protected by copyright and patent law…
A bit more on Steve Jobs. This article talks about the stock deal Steve struck with Microsoft. Apple had run itself almost into bankruptcy while Steve started Pixar.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admits they had no idea Apple would rebound like they did.
Have we seen many Entrepreneur’s with a career like Steve Job’s? Just creating Pixar would be a great achievement. Add in his two separate tenures at Apple.
Steve is in that genius category.
I agree. Guys like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs had a unique ability to use the skills of others to innovate and build huge companies.
Their intelligence is in a different area then Scientists.
The average person could never accomplish what Ford and Jobs did. They did have a unique type of Intelligence.
Joe P did not recognise the significance in a technical sense, obv, but in a general sense of awareness of the importance of his work they absolutely did. Einstein was a transcendant figure and one the most publicly engaged scientists in history - his lectures were major events written up in the press, general public allowed to attend in some cases - the whole world knew his name by the early 1920s as someone who was revolutionising our understanding of the universe.
In more general terms, knowledge is now of little worth and I wonder how this affects genius. I suspect genius at the level of Einstein or Newton was never about knowledge, but certainly in the old days you could be a very successful, eminent, scientist just on the back of your knowledge base. You can’t do that now. Knowledge is free on tap, so only those who are able to weigh it up, connect it in new ways, can do anything creative in science.
Seems a bit harsh. I’m fine with saying Leibnitz doesn’t / didn’t get the recognition he deserves, but Newton is not just propaganda; he made a massive contribution. Even if he was an arse.
I agree with your point though; we do sometimes elevate (local) people up as heroes just because that’s the way we want to imagine things. It’s why in movies problems are solved by at most a handful of friends, not huge international teams.
For British propaganda John Logie Baird or Alexander Fleming are probably better examples. 
I read a novel once which had Philo Farnsworth as a character and the writing initially made no sense to me. Literally never heard of the guy, as I only ever got the John Logie Baird telly-inventor story in the UK.
Alexander Fleming a terrible example, tbf.
Still trying to catch that damn roadrunner.
It is funny that my username keeps getting associated with the roadrunner. I understand why, but the real origin is that my friends often accuse me of building killer robots. So I started a joke where in emails to them, especially if I was pretending to be annoyed with them, I would have “beep kill? beep” and then “No, not yet, but soon.”
I would like to comment on some of the responses. But first let me mention a mathematician who was unquestionably the super-genius of the second half of the 20th: Alexandre Grothendieck. What you never heard of him? Well, he only revolutionized two fields of mathematics (topological vector space theory and algebraic geometry, most especially the latter) before going off the deep end.
In discussing Einstein, you have to distinguish special and general relativity. For the former, it was in the air. Space contraction, for example, had been proposed as a computational tool, but Einstein was the first to propose that space actually contracted. But someone would have come up with it if he hadn’t. And there were a few other papers in 1905 that put Einstein in the forefront. Until his paper on Brownian motion, there were still physicists who doubted the existence of atoms (“Have you ever seen one?”) And his paper on the photo-electric effect (which won him the Nobel prize) was one of founding documents of quantum mechanics. Curiously, he viewed QM as a computational tool, not a description of reality. The opposite tack from his view of special relativity. But general relativity was orders of magnitude more spectacular than all that. It is not obvious that even today, 100 years later, that anyone would have come up with the theory. Maybe Ed Witten.
As for Tao vs. Conway, my money is on Tao. Conway had impressive breadth, but it is hard to name one truly spectacular thing he did. Invent the game of life (and thereby prove the existence of a self-reproducing automaton), very clever, but not deep. Find a finite simple group, very nice, but a number of other people did that too. I would compare him to Erdos for breadth. But is Tao the super-genius of the XXIth? Come back and ask in 50 years. So far, not in the Grothendieck class. No one had to say let’s wait 50 years to judge. His revolutionary genius was recognized virtually immediately. Same as Einstein.
In part, it is the whole new area just about to open up thing. Whoever gets there first is famous.
There’s apparently not a whole lot of really big next big things about to burst. So many people are looking hard all the time it’s hard for something to be overlooked by all but 1 person.
I have met really, really smart people. While I have a PhD, a bunch of papers and some fame, I’ve met people at a completely 'nother level from me. E.g., Bob Tarjan, Turing Award winner. Very nice to me and all considering I must seem like a Neanderthal in comparison.
Then there are people like John Conway still around who amazes a lot of the top people. (And who is also a nice person to talk with.)
Einstein didn’t become famous until 1919 when Eddington’s confirmation of his work hit the newspapers. Talk about British propaganda! If a non-British team had done the calculations, the British press would have ignored or attacked it. The reconciliation of German and British science after the war was a unique cultural factor in this instance.
And so is Hawking’s disease. Absolutely nobody in physics thinks he’s the top physicist in the world; he’s famous for being brilliant and crippled. Ed Whitten is usually mentioned as the top of the field. The public has never heard of him, and though he’s had a hand in most of the Big Theory physics that anyone in the public cares about, you can’t give him a soundbite like you can Newton or Einstein.
That is my hope, there are if anything a ton of extremely talented, intelligent people. But there are so many and their work so esoteric that nobody notices them outside their fields.
It’s silly of you to take this tack, I think. If British propaganda was so dominant, how come James Clerk Maxwell isn’t so well known?
Pixar was founded in 1974. Steve Jobs became an investor in 1986.
What Steve Jobs was best at was looking at what other people were already doing crudely, waiting for the available technology to improve, then introduce his own reworking of the item later in a slicker package. (On top of not creating Pixar, he didn’t create the home computer, didn’t create the GUI, didn’t create the MP3 player, and didn’t create the smart phone.)
Tongue => Cheek
Like people mention above, there’s several critical flaws with the very concept of a ‘super-genius’ :
(1) Measured by a paper test or by accomplishments? No doubt you can find someone out there who did extremely well on an artificial IQ test at a young age. Since IQ test scores are a function of how many questions correct, how long did it take, and age, there are people out there that could get a stupidly high number on some tests. 180 IQ or something.
(2) I recall there’s someone out there who just writes some blog or a newspaper column giving advice. But greater IQ, even if they are actually smarter, doesn’t substitute for good judgement or subject domain knowledge, so I doubt their advice is always the best.
(3) Amazing inventions get created by some people. Are they super-geniuses as a result? Well, it’s also a function of opportunity and a shit-ton of luck. Is Palmer Lackey a super-genius because he had a garage full of previous VR headsets, taped together a better one, and got John Carmack interested? What Palmer Lackey did was no different than straightforward prototyping - thousands of product engineers could have done the same thing. They just aren’t all billionaires, partly because of luck and partly because they weren’t in the right place at exactly the right time.
(4) Was Einstein a super-genius? Did other people come up with the concept of relativity, an esoteric but straightforward extrapolation from the actual experimental data, around that same period of time?
(5) do brain cells even work that differently in some people to make a super genius possible? Are there people walking around with brains that have conduction velocities that are measurably 10 or 100 times faster? Are there people with gigantic brains that are 10 times the grey matter volume of the average brain?
The answer is no to both questions. Some people are smarter than others, but the difference in absolute terms is small. A person with 180 IQ is not “1.8 times” smarter than a person with 100 IQ, the actual absolute difference in neural performance is less. Some people might have 10 or 20% more brain tissue or nerve conduction speed, not 1000%.
In conclusion : some day we’ll see real super geniuses. AI beings or emulated humans or cyborgs of the future will probably exist that have massive increases in usable brain performance over humans. It will be interesting to see what such beings are like.
Ever notice how google can get an answer back from searching all the sites on the internet (well, a database made from them) in way under a second? That’s far, far, far, far beyond what a human can do. It just doesn’t seem like a super-genius because google is not very clever in how it processes data, it mainly uses a relatively simple algorithm written by humans. But that is changing.
I think just among the set of things we know we don’t know there are big areas waiting to drop. It’s still hypothetically possible someone could publish a fresh model on some aspect of consciousness and be famous overnight.
But by and large it does seem the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and most discoveries from here on in will happen in a very un-movielike way over years with many teams being involved and well as public and private investment.
The same with engineering. CRISPR and base-editing could have a big impact on society very soon, and what brilliant, eccentric guy do we get to hold up as the inventor?
Or…what you said. 
Here’s a horrifying little stat I put together recently regarding lack of education for females. (It’s pertinent, your Honor, just give me a moment . …)
Taking just the 30 worst nations for female literacy, which range from 60% down to a mere 11% literacy for women. Multiply that by the estimate of the female population, I came up with close to 650 million women who will never learn how to read.
That means about 13 million potential Mensans (top 2%) and nearly 650 thousand triple nines, who will never even be taught how to read.
Where are our super-geniuses? Check in:
India 60.00%
Morocco 58.00%
Malawi 58.00%
Bangladesh 58.00%
Haiti 57.00%
Zambia 56.00%
Togo 55.00%
Bhutan 55.00%
Yemen 55.00%
Nepal 53.00%
Congo (Democratic Republic) 50.00%
Nigeria 50.00%
Guinea-Bissau 48.00%
Gambia 47.00%
Senegal 46.00%
Pakistan 46.00%
Mozambique 45.00%
Mauritania 42.00%
Ethiopia 41.00%
Sierra Leone 38.00%
Liberia 33.00%
Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) 33.00%
Chad 32.00%
Burkina Faso 29.00%
Mali 29.00%
Benin 27.00%
Central African Republic 24.00%
Afghanistan 24.00%
Guinea 23.00%
South Sudan 16.00%
Niger 11.00%
That’s undeniably true of special relativity, utterly false for the general theory.
