Since this is a topic open to subjective opinion, I posted it to IMHO. I’d be interesting in hearing nominations for World’s Smartest Person.
Living or dead?
I guess those can be listed as two separate categories.
I’m finding it hard to pick a single one (or two, broadening to the living and dead subcategories). So I made up my own categories & nominations:
Nominations for Those Ahead Of Their Time:
[ul]
[li]Charles Darwin[/li][li]Gregor Mendel[/li][li]Leonardo da Vinci[/li][li]Galileo[/li][li]Euclid[/li][li]Socrates[/li][/ul]
Nominations for Those So Smart, They Made God Go “Daaaaaaaaamn!”:
[ul]
[li]Stephen Hawking[/li][li]Albert Einstein[/li][li]Enrico Fermi[/li][li]Nicolai Tesla[/li][li]Ken Jennings[/li][li]The guy that invented the “Sex Sells” approach to marketing 
[/li][/ul]
Einstein would have to get a mention. Like at the top of my list.
That wasn’t a guy, that was the first member of the world’s oldest profession.
My vote goes to Stephen Hawking.
I doubt anybody’s ever heard of the smartest person in the world. I mean, what are the chances that somebody would be the smartest person in the world and ambitious and lucky and all the other things that would be required for anyone to have ever heard of them?
I’d probably have to go with Richard Feynman.
Here’s why.
#1. Amazing phyisct. Noble prize.
#2. He was smart enough to tell people when he didn’t know enough to answer a question. For example, in one of his books he talks about how the government asked him to go to a meeting. The meeting turned out to br abbout how the military could best do somethings (sorry, it’s been a while since I read his book, don’t remember the details). Feynman got up and told them that a buyer for Macy’s would be better at answering the kinds of questions being asked than he ever would.
#3. He covered a lot of ground. He did physics. He did the whole Space Shuttle Challenger thing. He decoded the Mayan Dresden Codex from scratch. He did work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.
Smart man. Funny as well, or at least his books are.
Slee
Me.
Just for the hell of it, I’m going to nominate R. Buckminster Fuller.
I’m gonna vote no on Ken Jennings – amazing memory for trivia, ridiculously well-read – but in terms of doing something with it (other than winning a shitload of money), not in the same class as Einstein et al.
I think you might mean Nikola.
I’m gonna steer things away from science and nominate William Shakespeare, who wrote plays so damn good and so damn illustrative of human behavior that people still read and perform them 400 years later. And not just because they were assigned in English Lit 101.
Back to science – no love for Isaac Newton?
Newton, Shakespeare, Goethe, Aristotle, Kant, and Darwin all come to mind. It’s hard to put numbers on these people since they all did such different things.
Ditto. I was a bit surpised to see him here. Doing well on a quiz show is not really my idea of smart. It’s just memorization and good recall in the end. Probably doesn’t hurt that the guy is clean as a whistle, either, since, IIRC, certain substances can impair one’s memory.
I’d say people who’ve made incredible intuitive leaps and bucked conventional wisdom, like Copernicus and Pythagoras. I’d also venture a guess that there are a lot of brilliant people out there that toil in R&D obscurity. Maybe even some Dopers. Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway has come up with some very imaginative, out-of-the-box kind of stuff, for example.
In the living catagory I’d like to nominate Ed Witten
I hear Henry Kissenger is pretty smart. Though he probably has a lot more political, cultural, and social knowledge than hard-up straight facts, but he can probably still ace a college physics exam.
Henry Kissinger signed my Birth Certificate!
Yes I know it’s utterly off topic, but I’ll never have the chance to bring up that factoid again!
We’ve got to hear this story!