For most intelligent women (or female entrants to the general category), my votes would be
Hypatia of Alexandria (by all accounts spookily brilliant)
The Abbess Heloise (of “& Abelard” fame)- she had the equivalent of several doctorates in an age when most women were illiterate
Marie Curie
Grace Murray Hopper (more than just a pretty face, she was a natural mathematics savant)
Admittedly I only know her through Parade, but I’ve never understood the hoo-hah over Marilyn.
It’s not fair to assume anything. Newton invented it when he was around 22, I think.
Just curious, how old was the great Archimedes when he was run through with a sword?
I once read that many of Edison’s inventions were not his own work, and that he took credit for inventions made by his staff. Wikipedia says something similar:
Why is it stupid?
Also how do we know that he wasn’t gay but abstained because he believed gay sex to be wrong?
Okay, so he wasn’t as smart as I thought. But the question remains, How old was he when the swordsman got him?
Ummm… about 75 I’d reckon.
Kant’s only genius was to write obscurely enough that it’s impossible to say for sure what he meant. This is the lazy philosopher’s strategy for ensuring that you’ll still be taught 2 centuries from now.
My first thought for a Female Smartypants was Grace Hopper but I couldn’t recall her entire name.
I’ll rephrase my post: He never had an intimate, physical relationship with another person, and that’s stupid.
Why is it stupid? Because having that kind of connection with another person adds to the life experience in so many ways.
It’s estimated that maybe 60 to 100 billion people have lived throughout history, depending on how you define “people.”
Since my probability and statistics coursework is far behind, can anyone calculate how many people from, say, 80 billion would have IQs at 6.7 SD from the mean?
Of those people for whom we have a record to base such a hypothesis, no one comes close to Newton. There is simply no one else that leaves a record of complex problem-solving with such consistent rapidity.
What - you go around searching for people posting opinions about Newton? How did you come across this 9yo zombie thread?
I have to ask to the board at large, is this something that net 'bots do?
Newton is definitely up there. Euler may be a strong contender as well. Archimedes’ brilliance also cannot be overstated. Mendel is an interesting choice but I’d classify him more as curious and patient rather than madly brilliant.
Of course, Einstein is way up there, even if a lot of the pieces were there and he put them together, many brilliant men of his time couldn’t/didn’t, and who knows if anyone else would have.
Would he have used the shift against Ryan Howard against a lefthander with one out and a runner on second late in game with a 2-tun lead?
Alchemy is nothing to be ashamed of. With current science, transmutaion of elements is practicable.
There’s different types of IQ. Even there’s EQ, or Emotional Quotient. One point of view is to look at Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Thinking. There are 6 levels: remembering, understanding, applying, evaluating, analyzing, and creating. There are people who are skilled in one or a few of these, and these would probably be measured on a traditional IQ test: remembering, understanding, applying, evaluating, and analyzing. Creating, however, is a class by itself and historically only a very very gifted few were able to come up with original ideas with very little outside influence, and it’s virtually impossible to test. To me, the world record holder in say remembering the order of thousands of cards would probably be a similar level as say an einstein’s ability to see the relationship between different observations, e.g. deducing the existence of atoms by looking at pollen vibrating, if viewed through the lens of an IQ test.
This also leads to the idea that artistic vision is another form of creating and should be on the same level as scientific discovery. Which artists are geniuses yet would fail an IQ test? My guess would be all of them.
My personal nominations for genius creators:
The Wright Brothers: invented their own wind tunnel and ran their own experiments on flight, using careful observation and scientific methods to discover how to do it. According to Wikipedia, they were both high school dropouts without any advanced or formal education.
Thomas Edison: Rainman of inventors, probably autistic or gifted in some way. The lightbulb was the most hailed, but I believe it’s more an example of analyzing than creation.
Whoever discovered fire and the wheel.
Whoever invented rising bread: I swear, there’s nothing at all that makes sense in the steps for making bread, whoever figured it out was a genius.
James Cameron: Wins the artistic genius category in my book. Had a vision, told the naysayers to go fuck themselves, and made billions. Also self-taught, I believe. Had an apprenticeship making models or something.
I’d put Einstein and Archimedes up there as being as smart as Newton, if not smarter. And Einstein was also a much more pleasant person to be around than Newton. And was smart enough to get laid once in a while, if not frequently. Einstein would have been considered for that based on his 1905 work alone. Let’s remember that he also came up with general relativity 10 years later, far beyond the cutting edge of physics at the time using cutting edge mathematics that impressed Hibbard, who was doing the same sort of thing. Nobody else was close to general relativity. Leibniz re-discovered calculus at about the same time as Newton. Newton’s great unique contributions come in optics and the laws of motion.
Edison’s “genius” was primarily for ripping off the people who actually invented things, and taking the credit. Apart (I think) from the phonograph, hardly any of the inventions he claimed, and made money from, were based on original ideas of his own, although it may be true that it was he (and his staff) who turned them into commercially viable products. If anything, he was more like a psychopath than an autistic savant, a ruthless businessman good at manipulating people and manipulating his public image, precisely the sort of thing autistics can’t handle. (I am not saying he actually was a psychopath.)
If people are mentioning “da Vinci” instead of “Leonardo,” I’m gonna mention “di Stagira” for “Aristotle.”
I mean, the guy actually taught us how to think.
