Every second of every day since birth. 
I’ve noticed there are alot of HE and Him type pronouns here.
Is there a lack of female genius or what?
I’ve known a few people in the scary-smart category, and they were all pretty normal. My first geology lecturer, for instance, was the world expert in his field, but real fun to hang out with. Bit driven, though.
Our own Stranger on a Train? 
While an undergraduate engineering student in the late 1980s, I worked as a co-op student for COMSAT in Clarksburg, MD. They hired quite a few co-op students while I was there, but only made a job offer to one. He was the Electrical Engineering God. Graduated top of his class and went on to receive a PhD in EE from Stanford. Amazing person. He now works for Infinera in California.
I’ve known two people whose mental functioning was immeasurably beyond what we think of as “normal.” Not just a quantitative difference, but a qualitative. Both gave the impression of being almost the next evolutionary step beyond homo sapiens.
One was a very famous author. The other was, among many other things, an alcoholic who drank himself to death at age 50.
Well, Caroline Walker-Bynum blew me the hell away when I met her, but I never worked with her. She’s a MacArthur Fellow.
Sure, a few. None were crazy or any more remarkable than anyone else.
One of mine was female.
Why not go ahead and mention her name? Even though as with communism her ideas failed to take into account human nature, her unquestionable brilliance still deserves recognition.
Ayn Rand’s concept of “human nature” was very different from yours.
Indeed. 
And I’m still hoping you’ll write about your expeiences with her one of these days, as despite her flaws she was a fascinating and incredibily intelligent woman.
Is that genius genius or Hollywood genius? :dubious:
Read his books, you’ll understand.
Tons. At MIT a friend of mine majored in math and physics, played guitar, smoked dope, played poker, was politically active, studied only once in a while, and got all As and is now a professor somewhere. My first thesis adviser was a student of von Neuman’s, wrote the world’s first assembler, and had the largest prime number for a while.
And in grad school I got to teach two of the kids of the professors who solved the four color problem. Andy Appel was a freshman, but he did a lot of the coding for the programs that they used to try all the cases, and ran them on the CDC mainframe that ran PLATO. He is a professor now, and testified against Microsoft in the antitrust case (I was so proud.) Dorothea Hakken did a lot better than he did in the class. She had a 12 year old brother who wrote a symphony.
When I worked for Bell Labs I knew lots of really smart people. But not Arno Penzias. I’ve presented to him, and I was not impressed.
I went to elementary shool with a slew of geniuses. You had to be at least ten points above genius level on the IQ test in order to enter the prgoram.
Looking back I feel sorry for the teachers, it was like herding cats. Because it’s true that the brilliant mind works differently, but it also works differently from other brilliant minds.
There are two in particular (both female for those keeping score) who were so far above the rest of us. . .It’s the scale on which they thought that was amazing. It’s hard to even express but I’ll try to create a metaphor for it. . .
If a normal person makes a decision about which piece of fruit to buy, they consult themselves to see what appeals, and perhaps what the prices are. And a smart person might narrow the choices to include a special nutritional need. And a genius might add to the equation any knowledge they had of the free-market nature of each supplier or country.
These two were looking two centuries down through history. They were analyzing how the nutritional aspects of the various offerings might affect human evolution. They were watching the world market effects and the topsoil erosion inherent to each plant. They were considering the geo-political nature of each market and making decisions about which countries they’d most like to see closely tied with ours.
And if somebody stopped to remind them, and if they happened to have money in their pockets, they might also eat. But they wouldn’t really notice they were eating. And they wouldn’t think to thank the person who reminded them.
And who can blame them?
I am one. I know a lot of them, too. I go around meeting them on purpose. Some of them are sociable, some are not, some are outright weird. I ended up a sociologist, so presumably I can at least fake normal pretty well. I am not very good at hiding the smartness; most of us are not. It’s not that we’re trying to impress everyone with how terrifyingly brainy we are, so much as all the weird connections and new angles and quick comprehension are a part of the way we think, and it comes out when we talk. Kind of an accent.
From my end, I can tell you that the worst part about being “gifted” or “a genius” or whatever the school labels you when they figure it out, is having to learn that being smart does not help with everything. Everyone makes such a big fuss over it when you’re a kid, but when you’re that smart that young, you literally have nothing to talk about with other kids in your age group, and adults are not prepared to get college algebra out of a nine-year-old, and tend to ignore you. A lot of really bright kids grow up very, very weird, just because they have nobody to meaningfully interact with at times when most people are learning to be social. Being smart doesn’t help with learning that as much as you’d think it would.
I worked at a startup a few years ago, the owner was a ‘genius’. An all-round normal guy, but wickedly intelligent. He conceived, founded and built a business, made it hugely successful and sold it to Oracle. He had also invented a bunch of stuff and had patents &Etc.
He was a nice guy and very generous, approachable and down-to-earth. He treated us (in his employ) to frequent lunches, dinners, socials. He encouraged us to volunteer our time to help the less fortunate, and once a month a bunch of people from the company would serve meals at a soup kitchen and stuff like that.
I forgot one. John Moore was a mathematician at IAS, and was mentioned a lot in the book “A Beautiful Mind” though was excluded from the movie since his affair with Alicia was not in keeping with the story arc. I can’t swear he is a genius, since when I visited his apartment and picked up one of his papers I could barely understand the first paragraph. However, his fellow topologists were organizing a conference in his honor, which is usually a dead giveaway.
There there was the guy who hired me at Bell Labs. He had a PhD in Math from Berkeley, taught himself electronics to the level where he won a lifetime achievement award in my field, was a noted poet who got an award from the NJ arts council, and was also a published mycologist, and served as the local resource when people poisoned themselves with wild mushrooms.
How do you define “genius”? A line drawn at an IQ of 140, regardless of motivation or success? Because I meet that single criterion, and I must say, it ain’t shit on its own.
Is that an IQ of 140 as measure by an actual professionally-administered IQ test, or something you took online? Those two criteria are really seriously not the same.