Yanno, kinda like Einstein, in the scary smart catagory?
What was it like?
What were there weaknesses?
My dad is a genius. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years, and a good part of my family does not speak to him, as he has a major personality disorder, perhaps narcissism, and anger management problems. Growing up with him was interesting… he couldn’t stay with one thing for very long, but rather skipped around from police work to auto shop owner to sign maker to courtroom artist and on and on and on, and we moved around a lot. My mother was the one that had the steady job and paid all the bills. On one hand, it’s cool to grow up with someone interesting and smart like that, that could literally do almost anything, but on the other, with those personality problems, life could be hellish.
Sure - lots. i’ve always worked at a University so there are quite a few rather clever folks around.
i’ve dated a few too - much like everything else, there’s quite a bit of variation.
Yes, but he’s now living off the grid in Nevada. I think he may have become a little bit loony (and evidently anti-technology). Had a bad home life with a shrew of a mother, spent all his spare time poking around in the lab with his father, who died while my friend was in high school. He was sort of a lost soul after that. Haven’t seen or spoken with him in 34 years. His father was also a genius and inventor, and was famous because of it and what he had achieved in the technology field. It’s too bad because my friend could have been at the top of the heap if he had chosen to pursue it, he was so scary smart. I’ve often thought of tracking him down, but haven’t pursued it in case he is loonier than I want to deal with.
My cousin is a genius. I’m convinced he’s autistic (his parents are in complete denial). He can do anything with a computer or math but can’t socialize normally. Weirdern’ owl shit, too.
It’s really more sad than remarkable.
I once worked with a fellow pianist who was very very good, and the guy who hired him said he was a child prodigy, super-smart, and all that. He was a total asshole to me, though not, it seemed, intentionally, and had minimal social skills, so he certainly fit the stereotype of autistic-spectrum-smart.
I have a friend who’s a Fellow at IBM, which is a pretty prestigious position for innovators and smarty pants. He’s way cool, a kind of hippie mad scientist type.
Yes, I have.
My old school was the best in the UK for his subject. When I told one his coursemates, I admired aerospace engineering students as I had a friend who did it who was really smart. He then said " oh you mean <friend’s name>
I think being known as the smart one in the 5th best school in the world qualifies him as an actual genius.
The smartest person I’ve ever met is a guy I met at Esperanto club. And most of these people study languages for fun.
We started learning the language at the same time and he was fluent in six months. One Wednesday I found the Shavian Alphabet online and showed it to him; by the following Sunday he was taking notes in it. He met a Bulgarian girl and suddenly his website popped up in Bulgarian as well as Shavian, Esperanto, English, and something else I don’t remember, probably math. Oh, and did I mention that he was a mathie? I think he’s now working in either higher mathematics or cryptography, I’m not sure.
But he was such a good guy. None of those social problems at all…
At my last job the company founder was a genius. He was one of the co-inventors of T9 text input and that made him a wealthy person. He would literally come up with dozens of invention ideas every week. He was amazing to be around but he needed a lot of babysitting to because he was overscheduled and he loved everything and didn’t have enough hours in the day. He died about a year ago.
These stories are fascinating. Keep them coming, please.
Samuel R. Delany. I have been on panels with him and have talked with him socially, and he never fails to come up with at least one brilliant insight every time.
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in my university, i’m not sure if you’d call it genius. we hear of people who graduated valedictorian from the toughest, most elite state-subsidized high school for gifted students in science and math. before they even matriculate they already earned advance units in college equal to two semesters, and then you sit beside them in class. my observations:
- nothing they say, do, or write makes me say ‘darndest thing,’ or ‘what the fvck.’
- most of them are not too sociable although one looked and acted like a playboy bunny.
- nothing seems impressive about them until you see their exam results.
- you usually hear about them a lot after college.
As a teacher, I’ve taught lots of very bright kids, but only one that seemed to be a real genius. His ability to synthesize information was beyond impressive, and his verbal skills were off the charts. His math/science skills were also very good, but it was the verbal stuff that was amazing. I’m used to very intelligent students. Every year I have several that I have no problem admitting are more intelligent than I am–but in all those cases, they have a sort of intelligence I can recognize, they are smart “like me”, only more so. With this kid, I couldn’t even follow how his brain worked.
His social skills were fine: he was quirky, to be sure, and as a freshman tended to be oversensitive and high-strung, but by the time he graduated he found his equilibrium. He won the school talent show by performing (quite credibly) a rap song on his ukulele. He was strangely obsessed with Harry Potter.
He’s about to start his third year at an Ivy League school right now and by all accounts doing fine. He’s rocking Mock Trial, apparently, and I suspect that means he’ll end up in law. I look forward to tracking his progress.
The second-smartest guy I know is my best friend.
We met at the same workplace, fixing electronics on the test bench. But he kept going up and up while I muddled along. He takes a job and learns all sorts of things as he goes along, including new computer languages, and he pulls it off every time.
And he has the social skills as well. He has the kind of diplomacy skills that let him go in and make everyone feel at ease… and this is very important in his job, a kind of technical sales and support for mainframe data storage systems. The salespeople may sell things, but he makes them work. Everyone loves him and wants him to work on their jobs.
Did I mention his troubleshooting skills? He has the ‘troubleshooting mind’. I learned that I do not when I worked next to him; I can’t even follow his reasoning sometimes. I’m no slouch at computers, and he’s the guy I go to when my stuff breaks… once my PC had a virus that had brought it to its knees, I spent weeks fighting with it, and he went in and renamed this, deleted that, and bang, the virus was disabled. I asked him how he did it, and he said, “You just have to know how viruses think”.
Twenty-five years I’ve known him and he still says things every day that make my mind stop in its tracks.
Probably the most real genius I’ve known - and I come from a family full of scientists of various types - was a friend of my father’s. My father worked at Monsanto back in the old days, and befriended this guy. He was a master statistician, eventually was made a Monsanto Senior Fellow, and just brilliant all the way around. He had no family in St. Louis - he was from the east coast - and my father, a kind soul, started inviting him over for dinner, family time, that kind of thing. He was rather the shy, retiring type, and we kids were warned not to be too boisterous around him. He was a bachelor and had no family, but did warm up to us and enjoyed hanging around with ours.
Uncle Alan, as we started calling him, eventually became a real member of the family and ended up included at all kinds of occasions. Like I said, my family tends towards the brainy anyhow and he did well with the clan. From a kid’s point of view, he was the best adult ever - we were treated with respect by him, listed to, and never ever talked down to or treated like ‘kids’ - my Christmas present from him the year I was ten was a stack of classic adult SF novels, including ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The Illustrated Man’, ‘Foundation’, and several others - heady stuff for a geeky ten year old girl. He was also a LoTR fan in a big way, and when it came out bought me a hardback copy of The Silmarillion. My brothers got similarly interesting, challenging, and well-thought-out gifts.
He died in the early 80s, probably from what is now understood as sleep apnea and treated with a CPAP machine. I was in college at the time. I do miss him. I understand some of his statistics work is still considered groundbreaking. It’s hard to find info on him because it was all pre-internet, but he’s very fondly remembered in our family.
Yes, several, and all of them were varying degrees of batshit crazy. Seems that being that smart will break your brain in some way.
A few, and they’re mostly normal, if a bit eccentric.
Most of the smart people I knew were in my GATE classes when I was still just a kid. It was a bit of a shock for me when started having regular classes with other smart kids in middle school. I went from being the smartest kid in the class (sometimes in all the classes at that grade level) to being “normal”. Before that, I remember my mom having to make some kind of arrangements for special schedules at the various elementary schools I attended. Usually it was nothing more than doing a few classes with kids in grades 2 or 3 ahead of me.
In that middle school class, we all had different strengths. I can’t remember any of us being really exceptionally good at everything, which probably means none of us were bona-fide geniuses. I certainly am not, by my standards. Very smart, tested IQ in the bottom end of the bracket labeled “genius or near-genius,” but I’ve met lots of people who are equal or better than me at different things so I consider that labeling to be mostly bullshit.
I’ve never met anyone who I thought was scary smart, someone so beyond me that I couldn’t even follow where they were going. I’m sure they’re out there, I just haven’t met any.
I agree with that. I have chatted with him on Facebook several times and exchange emails with him pretty regularly; he is absolutely a bonafide genius. Definitely the most imaginative person I have ever interacted with. I really think it would take a genius to write something like The Mad Man.
This is one of those justifications that comes up when people ask about name-brand schools. One of the reasons I love the debt I’m in (financially and gratitudinally) is because of the experiences and opportunities I had there. I’m absolutely sure that geniuses have attended every single school in the country, and it’s not the school that makes the genius, but the reputation and hyper-selectivity promotes a higher concentration of geniuses on a large handful of campuses.
The best part is that most of these name-brand schools are fairly old and have very interesting architecture. Therefore, it’s much easier to find a quiet corner of campus to engage them in conversation, observe their thought processes and social skills, then crack their head open and eat their brain in order to absorb its inherent intelligence.