I guess it’s more cliché than fact. But I think most of you will agree, theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was assumed to be the smartest human who ever lived. When you want to call someone smart, you say they are a regular Einstein, after all.
But I wonder, just purely going by known facts (nothing just hypothetical), is this true? Was he really the smartest human being who walked the earth? Or is there someone clearly more smart than even he was?
:):)
I don’t see how you could fruitfully compare the genius of Einstein to the genius of Goethe, or any of a number of others.
I recall seeing an analysis, mostly based on writings, that put John Stuart Mill’s IQ in the 200-210 range. Einstein was around 175, IIRC.
Probably complete nonsense, as is almost every popular interpretation of “intelligence” and IQ. But it’s one of many such comparisons I can vague recall that put others well above Al.
At least in the 20th century, Albert Einstein was the most famous for being smart, which is not the same thing as being the smartest. John Von Neumann is one person who some claim was smarter than Einstein.
And yes, add me to those who argue that “smart” is not a single, scalar, rankable quantity.
The expression “smartest person” is meaningless noise.
If Einstein was so smart, how come he didn’t turn it into a profit center?
Hmmm?
If he was so smart, how did likening someone to Einstein become an insult? Huh?
Once you get up to the ultra-level genius levels, it becomes silly to rank historical figures on “smartness.” It’s especially fruitless when discussing novel thinking, such as invention or art.
Cecil would like to have a word with you.
If I had to spend an afternoon with either, it would be Einstein. Von Neumann was more than a bit of an ass. As for smart, Einstein had 1905 and General Relativity. Von Neumann was quick and clever and useful. Not even close. Einstein and Newton is a better argument.
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a solid case for Isaac Newton:
*Isaac Newton. You read his writings. Hair stands up – I don’t have hair there but if I did it would stand up – on the back of my neck. The man was connected to the universe in ways that I’ve never seen another human being connected. It’s kind of spooky, actually.
He discovers the laws of optics. He figures out that white light is composed of colors. That’s kind of freaky right there. You take your colors of the rainbow and put them back together, you get white light again. That freaked out the artists of the day. How does that work? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet gives you white!
The laws of optics. He discovers the laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation.
Then a friend of his says, “Why are these orbits of the planets in the shape of an ellipse (a sort of flattened circle)? Why aren’t they some other shape?”
And Newton says, “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.”
So he goes home and comes back a couple months later. “Here’s why. They’re actually conic sections, sections of a cone that you cut.”
So they say, “How did you find this out?”
“Well, I had to invent integral and differential calculus to determine this.”
Then he turned twenty-six. Then he turned twenty-six!
We got people slogging through calculus in college just to learn what it is that Isaac Newton invented on a dare, practically. So that’s my man, Isaac Newton.
*
Cecil wrote a column about Einstein being or not being the smartest man in history?
In an earlier era Leonardo da Vinci was no fool either. Got sidetracked by art.
TCMF-2L
Stephen Hawkins is pretty smart, but then there’s the *walking *thing…
QUOTE FAIL QUOTE FAIL QUOTE FAIL… goddammit.
There’s no question Newton was an unearthly genius and made more contributions to the foundations of modern math and science that about any other half-dozen people you can list.
Too bad he spent nearly all of his career on alchemy and spiritual booshwah. Just think what he might have accomplished had he swapped career and hobby.
Gauss. Check and mate.
There may exist a faster sprinter in the world today than Usain Bolt, but Bolt is probably the best known sprinter.
Is there a difference between intelligence and quality of discoveries? I think so.
Even within the field of physics, I’d say that the top three were Einstein, Newton, and Archimedes… but I’d be very hard-pressed to rank those three amongst themselves. Einstein gets more rep for it nowadays mostly due to being the most recent of the three.
And I kind of feel sorry for Maxwell, the fourth greatest physicist in history, who nonetheless managed to get overshadowed just a few decades later.
Smartest guy ever was Torg, a Pictish lad who lived in 321 BC and died at age 12 of an infected spear wound. I mean, he didn’t invent anything, never learned to read because his tribe hadn’t invented such things, and spent most of his time daydreaming when he should have been looking after the family goats. But if you put him in today’s modern universities he’d spend most of his time playing Warcraft and goofing off, because he was really really lazy. Like, super lazy. He’d fail all his classes and never amount to anything and do a lot of complaining about how his professors were intimidated by his superior intellect.