Please demonstrate your point.
Einstein, Newton and Archimedes would be my top three. I didn’t really care for Maxwell until that silver hammer demonstration of justice.
Are we talking about the right Einstein?
I’ve heard IQ can’t really be measured above 160. Not sure how true that is.
There have been several people who currently live whose IQs have been estimated to be in the low 200s (200-230). Kim Ung-Yong, Terrance Tao, Christopher Hirata, etc. That would give them an IQ about 50 points above Einstein.
Malcolm Gladwell once claimed that an IQ above about 130 stops being relevant. He compared to to height in the NBA. There is a rough minimum height needed to succeed in the NBA, but there is no guarantee the 7’2" player is better than the 6’5" player. It is possibly the same with IQ. You may need an IQ of 130+ to be a productive scientist or researcher, but the guy with a 190 IQ may not be as productive or innovative as the guy with a 150 IQ.
Plus quality of discovery plays a role. Someone who develops meaningful engineering advances that save millions of lives is doing more productive work than someone who works on theoretical math that has no appreciable real world uses.
I thought we were talking about Albert Einstein.
Darwin has had a bigger impact on science than von Neumann. von Neumann was smarter.
Pursuing art is hardly being sidetracked.
Von Neumann was smarter than Erasmus Darwin. He was not smarter than Charles Darwin. My post is my proof.
Hawkins?
IRR that Gauss is considered to be Newton’s equal in mathematics and that Gauss, Newton and Archimedes are the three greatest mathematicians of all time.
Only Einstein vies with Newton for the lead in physics, although James Clerk Mawell ought to be considered a strong second.
I do not think Hawking is close to being in the running for the top spot.
Curious that prowess at mathematics, and in particular its application to physics, gets you labelled as smart, and skills in other areas don’t.
As a geek, I should approve. But really, it is just silly.
Smart means all sorts of things.
I don’t think Einstein was the smartest human. I don’t think Einstein wanted to be the smartest human.
I think Einstein had something greater than sheer intelligence: insight.
Insight is why Newton codified the universe and Einstein unraveled time.
I’d rather investigate who could peer into the world and illuminate what is dark.
Also factoring in the Flynn effect, Einsteins IQ would be lower by today’s standards. I have heard Einstein was at about 160, but I don’t know if that is measured by 2010 standards or by 1920 standards. If the latter, an IQ of 160 in 1920 is about 130 in 2010. Which would make Einstein about as smart as a bright graduate student.
Einstein did a great of illuminating.
To start with, the Special Theory of Relativity pretty well fully illuminated the biggest problem of the time in physics, by eliminating the need for being of a substance called the “Lumineferous Ether”, which supposedly permeated all space, and was the medium through which electromagnetic waves traveled. The trouble was, numerous sophisticated experiments could not find a trace of the stuff, and the theoretical big guns had to resort to such stratagems (which I think did turn out to be part of the solution) such as rulers shortening in length in their direction of travel. There was unease due to the ad hoc nature of these stratagems until Einstein’s light gave them a fully-formed reason for being.
He also did much to illuminate light itself. Fast forward about 20 years to a little-known fact that Einstein was in the early 1920s the first to predict the possibility of stimulated emission of light (viz. lasers). And then back to 1905 he correctly predicted that light may be considered to consist of quanticized particles now known as “photons”, thus overturning a century or two of tradition holding that light had wave properties but no particle properties.
Einstein deserves to be considered as great a scientist as any, including Newton.
I thought Einstein gets more buzz because they preserved his brain and it’s supposedly anomalous compared to normal people. I bet Ramanujan was of comparable intelligence, but no one’s putting his brain in a jar.
If Einstein was such a genius, how come he spent the last 20 years of his life living in New Jersey?
Einstein was at the very cutting edge of mathematics when developing the general theory of relativity. At his first public presentation Hibbard saw a few areas that he had been working on that Einstein had independently developed, and Hibbard was a few steps ahead. Hibbard was kind enough to Einstein to fill him in after the presentation on what he could do to finish the math, and that was all Einstein needed to complete things.
Hear, hear
These kinds of stereotypes of what is “smart” should have died a long time ago. Instead they’ve grown such that if people see you write out a few equations they think you’re teh smart and must be good at everything. While I’ve been the beneficiary of this from time to time (giggidy), it’s nonsense.
And actually, Einstein in some ways is a good example of that.
His contribution to physics is no doubt up there with Newton and Galileo. But by all accounts he was a late bloomer to mathematics and was never considered to have great ability in that area by his contemporaries. Modern day theoretical physics is much more demanding in that sense.
I think if you were to teleport, say, a 16 year old Einstein to the year 2015, I think he would struggle to ever make his name as a theoretical physicist.
Who is Hibbard? Did you mean to say Hilbert?
That is Hilbert.
The account I read was that Hilbert stepped in very late in the game to actually compete with Einstein for creation of the final form of the field equations of gravitation, but that Einstein barely beat Hilbert to it, making use of Hilbert’s mathematical work- only fair since Hilbert was making use of about eight years of work by Einstein.
There are some ideas whose time has come, and will be discovered no matter who is around. Then there are ideas that come from left field with an unexpected stroke of genius and inspiration. They jump us forward in unpredictable leaps.
Some ideas need a confluence of support from various disparate sources to make work. GR is clearly one. SR was going to be codified within the decade even if Einstein had never lived. GR may have taken quite a while longer. Hard to know. Once the genie was out of the bottle for the revival of serious theoretical physics there was no end of seriously smart people working on it. The first couple of decades must have been the most intensely exciting time in the entire history of physics.