Remotely possible :). I was born in ‘68 and he published his doctoral thesis in 1970, then we were off to Boston. He would have been a ~6’ 3’’ black-haired guy with a slavic name.
Probably not, then. I didn’t take Physics until my sophomore year (1970-71).
Hawking’s reputation is exactly what it should be in the world of science.
It’s only in the world of pop culture that he might be overrated and/or overexposed.
Here in Austin, we have a Nobel-winning physicist, Steven Weinberg by name. Not 1 Austinite in 100 could tell you who he is. EVERYBODY knows Hawking, on the other hand, and that’s NOT because of the brilliance of his work. It’s because he’s appeared on “Star Trek” and done guest vocals for Pink Floyd.
No more or less worthless than your statement that it’s flat-out wrong that he isn’t regarded as the most brilliant person alive.
What I was particularly referring to as being flat-out wrong is your assertion that “no one” is regarded as the most brilliant person alive. If one were to conduct a poll such as you suggest, some individual is going to get majority or at least a plurality of the votes, and that person could be considered to be “widely recognized” as the most brilliant person alive. Even if it’s not Hawking, some individual would most likely qualify for that status.
Since I’ve provided some evidence in support of my opinion, while you have not, I think your statement is more worthless than mine. 
I’m with Wendell. If you conduct such a poll, and the winner gets 2% of the vote (as I suspect would happen), I don’t see how you can claim “he’s widely considered the most intelligent person alive”.
He’s probably the most widely known “highly intelligently” person alive, but that is not the same as the implications of …“He’s widely considered the most intelligent person alive.”
“Intelligence” is difficult to define and I.Q. measurement is still debated. But since that is the term that is being discussed, the last I.Q. score that I read for Stephen Hawking was slightly over 200. I’m sure there are others who measure that well. The highest adult score that I am familiar with is Marilyn vos Savant with and IQ of 228. (Yes, that is her real name.)
Even I have known someone with an I.Q. of 190. It’s not just his intellect that makes Stephen Hawking so memorable. It’s the whole package. His gift for making difficult concepts more understandable, the struggle that has made him a winner dispite adversity, his sense of humor, and even the audacity that he had in having an affair with one of his assistants. I think they “ran away” together, so to speak.
My favorite image of him was caught on film. He was sitting by himself just thinking, but whatever it was he was thinking about was funny enough to make him laugh.
There is no IQ test in existence which can measure a score of over 200, and even for an IQ of 190, you’d need a special test customized specifically for people with extremely high IQ, which is a lot more trouble than most people go through. Most IQ tests will only register up to 160, and even then, they can only be administered by trained psychologists with a significant time investment.
It is also pretty questionable what IQ means at that point. It certainly serves as a measure of deviation from the mean with regard to performance on the types of tests used to measure IQ, but that is a rather recursive definition that offers nothing of substance. Furthermore, at levels beyond three standard deviations (IQ~145) the definitionally small amount of population that falls into this regime makes an evaluation of ability questionable. At a >6 sigma level (IQ~190), there are only a few thousand there are only a few thousand people out of the world population against whom a specific person could be compared. Statistically, someone at this level is such an outlier that any test geared toward the mean would have a significant error bound at high deviations, so a linear quantification is meaningless. It would make more sense to assess such people on a logarithmic scale in terms of standard deviation.
IQ does, up to a point, predict the ability of an inexperienced individual to undertake novel intellectual tasks and perform research on sparse foundation of information, but it does not ultimately correlate particularly well with academic or professional accomplishment. Dick Feynman was reputed to have an IQ somewhere in the upper 120s or lower 130s (based upon Army occupational testing) but was very clearly not only one of the pre-eminent physicists of the 20th Century but also had a diverse number of other intellectual and creative interests.
Back to Hawking, he clearly thinks very deeply in ways that most of us are just not equipped to do. To conceptualize the physics and math at the level that he does, his brain is highly efficient at organizing large amounts of information, mental images, and abstractions in a way that, say, a police officer or bank teller does not have to do. Although there is probably a significant innate component to this ability, it is also the result of spending literally decades in training his mind to work in this fashion, a concept which will be familiar to others that work in technical fields involving applied math. A computer scientist will “see” stacks of data and imagine communication protocols; an EM engineer will envision fields interacting with one another; a mechanism designer will intuit how a chain of components interact and will conceptualize bodies in terms of free body diagrams; a chemist will envision the interaction of molecules. Roger Penrose clearly can conceptualize N-dimensional topologies that I can’t even begin to make sense of in my head. No doubt Hawking has a mental image of the conformance of space and interaction of quantum particles, even though these things are complete abstractions based upon complex tensor mathematics and topology. (I doubt anyone can actually envision protein folding problems, but no doubt many molecular biologists try or have some semblance of conception.)
And if Marilyn vos Savant is “The World’s Smartest Woman” I weep for humanity. She’s a competent writer and clearly an enthusiast of puzzles, but she seems to get a lot of things wrong (although she was correct about the Monty Hall problem). Certainly her academic and vocational success is nothing to rave about.
Stranger
Marilyn vos Savant did not get a score of 228 on a modern I.Q. test. She got it on the old-fashioned way of scoring I.Q. tests. Modern I.Q. scores are based on how many standard deviations your score is from the mean (with each 15 points higher or lower than 0 being one standard deviation). (This is after the test has been given to a very large group of people of your age or of adults.) Your score, even theoretically, couldn’t be any higher than (about) 200 or lower than (about) 0 because 200 (six and two-third standard deviations higher than the mean) and 0 (six and two-thirds standard deviations lower than the mean) are approximately one in 100 billion. There have only been 100 billion people in the history of mankind (and probably no more than a billion have ever taken an I.Q. test.) You can’t have an I.Q. of 228 because you can’t talk about someone being one in a quintillion (or whatever it would work out to).
Vos Savant was measured using the old-fashioned way. There used to be different tests for each age group. You would be given the tests for various ages around your true age. If the highest age-group test that you passed was age x and your true age was y, your I.Q. would be (x / y) times 100. So if you were 4 and passed the age-6 test, your I.Q. would be 150. Apparently vos Savant passed the age-16 test when she was 7, so her score was 228. Nobody uses this sort of testing anymore because it causes too much variance over a person’s lifetime in I.Q. scores.
Zoe, where have you met someone with an I.Q. of 190? That’s extremely rare. Was this his (or her) score on some worthless online I.Q. test? The I.Q. tests given to nearly everyone top out at 160. There are claims that certain I.Q. tests created for some high-I.Q. societies can measure higher scores, but that’s quite dubious. An I.Q. of 190 is excruciatingly rare, and it’s really quite unlikely that you’ve met someone who would theoretically have such a score, even if scores that high could be measured accurately.
“A Brief History” definitely is part of it – I was pretty young when it was released, but even then I was aware of how this “deep” book had suddenly appeared on everyone’s coffee table. He is best known, I’d suggest, because of his work (much like Sagan) to make complicated, abstract concepts understandable to the layman. The fact that he’s got a fascinating life story, and is instantly recognizable (even people who don’t know his name – which also happens to be easily-to-remember – will immediately know what you mean if you say “you know, the guy in the wheelchair, talks with a computer?”) helps to make him memorable.