Who would you include on a list of the 100 smartest human beings from 1900 to the present

In My Humble Opinion
1

The reason I’m picking 1900 to the present is because I feel like before roughly that age, a lot of intelligent people never got the chance to use their talents.

Maybe some super genius in China ended up being a farmer in 1830, but in the 1970s he would have options to use his intellect to advance science. Same with women or minorities in the west.

I don’t have the study on-hand (I think it was about Terman’s termites though) but I thought a study was done in the early/mid 20th century on extremely intelligent children whose IQs were in the very top range. A lot of the men went on to successful careers, but a decent portion of the women ended up as homemakers and didn’t achieve as much education as the men because of cultural constraints.

So my short list would be people like

John Von Neumann (smartest person who ever lived IMO)

Edward Witten

Terence Tao

Steven Weinberg

William James Sidis. He was intelligent, but I don’t know if he achieved much with it. He supposedly could learn a new language in a few days though.

People like Christopher Langan have high IQs, but they haven’t really done anything with them. He wrote an unfalsifiable, untestable philosophy that he seems to obfuscate behind flowery language.

I’m more concerned with people who actually used their intellects to accomplish something. Cutting edge research, etc.

I’m assuming that the most intelligent people are likely to be found in fields like physics or mathematics because these seem more complex than other fields, including other sciences.

I have no idea if this chart is accurate.

Obviously IQ isn’t everything. Creativity, work ethic, willingness to try new ideas, etc also matter. So does the SES of the person and their parents.

Critical thinking skills are supposedly a better predictor of life outcomes than IQ, though both lead to better life outcomes.

But as far as raw intellectual power that was used to accomplish things in cutting edge science and technology, who would be on the list?

2

Albert Einstein. The guy completely changed the way physicists looked at the way things worked and created a theory that has stood the test of time.

3

Really? Archimedes of Syracuse? Hypatia? Ptolemy? Aryabhata? da Vincii? Michaelangelo? Avicenna aka Ibn Sina? Goethe? Voltaire? Galileo? William Shakespeare? John Napier of Merchiston? Gottfried Leibniz? Isaac Newton? Charles Darwin? Carl Linnaeus? Alexander von Humboldt? Leonard Euler? Michael Faraday? James Clerk Maxwell? Hermann von Helmholtz? John Tyndall? Gregor Mendel?

You’ve introduced substantial bias into your evaluation with that assumption, but even accepting that to be true you’ve elected to ignore the intellectual giants upon whose shoulders your identified supergeniuses are standing.

There is no evidence, other than his say-so, that Chris Langan is a supergenius to rival all that have lived. He’s smart enough to convince people that he is really smart, but a number of his claims about how high his IQ has been measured and how much he has provided genius insights to others are absurd on their face. His “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe’ is completely unfalsifiable pseudoscience. and his promotion of conspiracy theories, eugenics and notions of “racial purity”, and more recent associations with prominent alt-right personalities and organizations have essentially self-ostracized Langan far more completely than just his lack of academic credentials and his arrogance alone ever could.

Stranger

4

@Stranger_On_A_Train has compiled an impressive list, although I can’t understand the omission of Gauss.

5

My concern is that those people existed at a time when you had to be a white man living in the right parts of the world, and likely had to come from a prestigious background to have an impact on science. Plus many of the tools of science didn’t exist in the past. What would’ve happened to someone like James Clerk Maxwell before the discovery of calculus and electromagnetism? He may have spent his life working as a cobbler.

There were a lot of women, non-whites, people outside of western nations, people of low socio-economic status, etc who could’ve made massive contributions to science in the time of Newton, Voltaire, Galileo, etc but who never did. What happened to all the geniuses who lived before the scientific revolution in europe in the 16th century? What happened to the people who were just as competent as Galileo who lived in Brazil or China at the time? What happened to the people who were just as smart as Galileo who lived before tools for astronomy like the telescope were invented? What happend to all the women and non-whites who lived in Europe during the scientfic revolution who were not allowed to contribute.

My point is that, by using geniuses from before the 19th century, I get the impression that only about ~5% of people were able to contribute to science in a meaningful way. There are exceptions like Marie Curie but for the most part you had to be white, male, in Europe and to a degree have enough socioeconomic status and connections. A lot of human capital has been lost in the history of the human race. A lot of non-whites, women, people outside the west, people born before the scientific or industrial revolutions, etc have lived and died who could’ve contributed to science who never got the chance.

In modern times someone born with high levels of human capital can act on it largely irrelevant of what they look like, how much money they have or what gender they are. That wasn’t the case 500 years ago.

As far as Christopher Langan, my understanding is that in the 1990s the TV show 20/20 hired a neuroscientist who specializes in psychology to have high IQ tested and it was beyond readable. Having said that, like I said, he hasn’t really contributed much to humanity other than a philosophy that can’t be tested or falsified.

However I can’t find the episode online.

According to this, the average IQ of physicians is around 125.

I found a paper by Richard Lynn discussing people with advanced degrees and their level of intelligence. But hes just going to get written off so I’ll skip that.

I found this paper, which is behind a paywall. But the actual paper shows people on the higher end of the IQ spectrum are more likely to pursue doctorates in the physical sciences and less likely to pursue careers in the biological sciences, arts, education, social sciences, etc.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706912

I don’t have the average IQ of someone who has a PhD in mathematics or physics, but I would not be surprised if it is higher than someone who pursues a PhD in a field like medicine and it seems to be higher than someone who pursues a PhD in a field like sociology on average. They’re also more productive in their fields. Higher IQ generally leads to more people pursuing physical sciences and higher levels of productivity in those fields. However it doesn’t discuss math or separate physics from other physical sciences.

The smartest people on earth are more likely to work in the physical sciences than they are to work in fast food.

6

The Curies, Fermi, and Feynman should be on the list for physics.

7

I generated it mostly by memory and I’m sure there are many omissions of brilliant contributors, particularly in literature and the arts. In fact, my list is totally devoid of musicians, not because there aren’t brilliant composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but just because I am not familiar enough to even attempt a comprehensive list, and of course our record of outstanding music composers is largely limited to ‘Classical’ and mostly German, Austrian, and Italian composers. And I certainly left out Molière and Sophocles who should be listed along with Shakespeare.

A number of people on that list are not white or male, and others, like Michael Faraday, came from very common or even impoverished backgrounds. For sure, there are certainly many potentially genius talents who never had opportunity or whose work or thoughts was not preserved for posterity but the idea that really brilliant people didn’t rise to great accomplishment before the 20th Century and comparable to modern geniuses just isn’t true. As for the claim that smart people gravitate toward mathematics or physics, it should be noted that prior to the 20th Century, and especially prior to and during the (European) Enlightenment period, most of what we would today consider scientists did not restrict or categorize themselves into the discrete disciplines that we recognize today. Many “natural philosophers” were as interested in biological and ‘Earth science’ phenomena as they were in basic mechanics or mathematics, and in essence their researches were often what we would now refer to as “systems science”. Of course, they were often wrong about many things because of a lack of broadly accepted foundational principles (a comprehensive review of Newton shows that he was wrong at least as much as he was correct, and also obsessed with alchemy, numerology, and eschatology, all of which are now firmly regarded as obvious pseudoscience) but they still provided brilliant insights about very complex phenomena.

For what it is worth, what the “Intelligence Quotient” actually measures is actively debated by neuroscientists but it is almost universally agreed that it does not represent a comprehensive evaluation of all facets of human intellectual capability, and beyond a certain threshold is not even an especially good metric for predicting overall intellectual achievement or success. What it does measure are factors that correlate to the kind of skills that are used in the physical sciences and mathematics, for what that is worth, but that only defines “smartest” in a narrow context of human achievement.

As I noted, Chris Langan is good at convincing people that he’s super smart, but he hasn’t actually produced any practical evidence of outstanding intelligence. I don’t know what kind of testing that this purported 20/20 episode referenced to demonstrate that Langan’s intelligence was “beyond readable” (not sure what that even means other than that it would be statistically outside the scale that the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (or whatever other scale was applied) could assess, but I’ll say that the few interviews I’ve seen of Langan give me the impression that he’s what an average layperson’s impression of a disaffected supergenius would be rather than actually being an off-the-scales intellectual giant. And, as noted, he’s advocated conspiracy theories and aligned himself with people and organizations that indicate a lack of self-awareness, good critical judgment, or basic intellectual integrity. I remain unimpressed with claims of his purported genius.

Stranger

8

I suspect the smartest people on earth are probably those who use the advantage they have over less smart people to obtain material and emotional benefits without the necessity of any real work or effort. The smartest among us in a purely biological sense are probably complete assholes.

9

I respect your opinions and consider you one of the most informed contributors to this website and always have. But I don’t agree myself. Many of the people you listed were white men from European backgrounds born during or after the scientific revolution, if not after the industrial revolution.

Voltaire was born to nobility

Leibniz’s father was a university professor and he attended his fathers alma mater

Goethe was born to a wealthy family.

Napier’s father was well off and well connected.

Helmholtz seems to have come from an upper middle class family.

Maxwell grew up in a financially comfortable home.

Euler received private tutoring for most of his childhood.

von Humboldt was from nobility

etc, etc, etc

There are exceptions and there are people who were not born into wealth and privilege. But many of the ones you listed were still white men born in europe after the scientific revolution and industrial revolution.

Again, the reason I said from 1900 onward is I feel that adds at least 4 things to the discussion

  • People now have the scientific tools and information to build new knowledge. Who would Galileo have been had he been born in the 11th century, before the telescope existed? Would he still have been a genius, or would he have been a farmer? Galileo also came from a well off, european family.

  • People outside of Europe can contribute to science

  • Non-whites and women can contribute to science

  • The poor and disenfranchised can contribute to science

Because of these things, we aren’t limited to only ~5% of the human population being given the opportunity to contribute to science and technology.

10

Donald J. Trump is a very stable genius.

11

stable genius/malignant narcissist

Tomato/tomatoe

12

I’m going to stop posting after this because I feel as if this is kind of a hijack to the basic query of your o.p. (and am only taking issue with the rationale behind it), but it has always been the case that “people outside of Europe” and “non-whites and women” can and have dramatically contributed to the human corpus of scientific (and mathematical) knowledge. Indeed, the Enlightenment, which is where most textbooks indicate or at least imply where “science” started, was substantially build upon rediscovery and exploration of previous research and experiment, and prior to that Europe doesn’t even figure all that much into scientific achievement, as much of the pre-Enlightenment theoretical science has its roots in Egyptian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and other traditions. And applied ‘science’ has been done by every successful culture in the form of improvements in agriculture, animal husbandry, architecture, warfare, materials and crafts, astronomy and climate prediction, et cetera. The entire notion that “Science” started with the tradition of the Enlightenment period is essentially assuming away everything that those innovations were based upon.

“The poor and disenfranchised” are still challenged, even today, to participate in scientific endeavors because support for the sciences is often indifferently funded and largely poorly compensated. If you haven’t attended primary and secondary programs that offer advanced schooling you will likely not get into a premier college, and if you don’t get a first rate scientific education and have the resources to spend a decade or more working through a PhD and multiple post-docs at near poverty levels of income (even assuming you can get into a competitive program) you can kiss away any expectation of doing cutting-edge research that advances any field of science. Even today, making a successful career as a scientist requires either access to generous financial resources or a whole bunch of luck in addition to highly focused hard work and perseverance.

As for your particular choices, while I don’t know that John von Neumann is “smartest person who ever lived”, he was certainly a brilliant polymath with numerous contributions to modern science and technology, you’ve ignored his wife, Klára Dán, who von Neumann regarded as a near peer and has arguably provided just as much advances to modern computing as her husband, including developing the first standardized ways of converting general algorithms into “code” and tracing errors (what would now be referred to as “debugging”, although that term, along with the formalization of a compiled computer language is actually attributed to Navy mathematician and computer scientist RDML Grace Hopper), and also developing and naming the “Monte Carlo” method now broadly used in simulation to produce useful estimates from complex statistical models. If we’re looking at “intelligence” in terms of accomplishments, she should be on that list, too.

Stranger

13

Keep in mind Von Neumann died in his early 50s from cancer. Had he lived a healthy life to 90, his contributions would’ve been much more significant. The brightest minds of the time considered him to be in a totally different league. Multiple Nobel laurates considered his to be beyond them in his mental capacities.

Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us

  • Edward Teller. Father of the hydrogen bomb

To gain a measure of von Neumann’s achievements, consider that had he lived a normal span of years, he would certainly have been a recipient of a Nobel Prize in economics. And if there were Nobel Prizes in computer science and mathematics, he would have been honored by these, too. So the writer of these letters should be thought of as a triple Nobel laureate or, possibly, a ​3 1⁄2-fold winner, for his work in physics, in particular, quantum mechanics

  • Peter Lax

You know that man makes me feel I know no mathematics at all

You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is

  • Enrico Fermi. Nobel prize in Physics 1938

von Neumann was the only genius

  • Eugene Wigner. Nobel prize in Physics 1963
14

Marie Curie
(Sticking out the way she did in a distortion field favoring men must mean she’s roughly 5x smarter than all the dudes mentioned: Nobel prize in chemistry and physics)

15

I just don’t think this is a useful question. While the people who make major discoveries are smart there a lot of other factors involved so it’s just not the case that these major discoverers are the smartest people in the world. Perseverance is a major factor “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” said by Thomas Edison. Being at the right place and time is a major factor: Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Etc.

16

George Carlin

Muhammad Ali

17

Nancy Pelosi

18

Just because a lot of intelligent people did get a chance to use their talents doesn’t disprove @Wesley_Clark’s claim that a lot of them didn’t.

That said, I think any era is going to have intelligent people whose talents lay undiscovered and unused. It’s quite possible that if we could somehow obtain an objectively correct list of the 100 smartest human beings since 1900, it would include people that none of us have ever heard of.

19

And they certainly wouldn’t all be scientists and philosophers.

20

It’s like Mark Twain’s story of a man dying and going to Heaven, and being introduced to the greatest general in all of history… but who lived his life without military service, as a humble cobbler.

In Heaven, they can recognize inherent talent like that. Here on Earth, we can’t.