The Smartest Person Who Ever Lived (2015)

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/01/the_smartest_person_to_have_ever_lived.html

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

22 37 3 years ago

the_biot• 3 years ago

This site, realclearscience.com, just says "you have been blocked", under a banner that says "realclear politics". It also appears to require javascript, and adblockers disabled. So I have no idea what it's all about.

But why does this smell like some far-right toxic crap, masquerading as "science"?

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Expectations maybe?

It's about Newton.

Beijinger• 3 years ago

Hm. Leonardo da Vinci would also be a good contender.

"The more I study Isaac Newton, the more fascinating he becomes."

Leibniz would also be a good contender:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/10/my-hero-leibni...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-understand-the-univers...

"Gottfried Leibniz, active in the 17th and 18th centuries, who along with Isaac Newton invented calculus. Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside."

----

"This interconnection (or accommodation) of all created things to each other,brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others,and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.

Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitudeof simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, . . .

And this is the way of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible, that is,it is the way of obtaining as much perfection as possible.

—G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology, 56-58, 1714

I once read once a quote about Leibniz, that roughly went like: When Newton was buried, he was buried like a king. When Leibniz was buried, only his servant was present. But the long Leibniz is dead, the longer his shadow becomes.

zw123456• 3 years ago

Agreed, I was surprised there was no mention of Da Vinci in the article, certainly he has to be in the top 10 in my view.

The_Blade2• 3 years ago

Leibniz was the first thing I thought - IIRC he and Newton basically "invented the calculus" simultaneously and independent of each other. But my stars, Newton's contributions to astronomy, optics, oobleck and fig-based treats put him a cut above :)

Da Vinci is somehow underrated here. The Codex Leicester with bike planes &c, probably in Gates' bathroom, and also he was somehow involved in the invention of double-entry accounting. What didn't Leo touch?

Benjamin Franklin, boy, that guy. The US, electricity. Bifocals. Franklin stove. Discovered the gulf stream. You can still go to where Ben puked in the Haymarket and occasionally rewrote TJ's little declaration of something or another.

BUT - the sleeper here is Thales of Miletus. The first true pre-Socratic philosopher, got into theories about electricity among other things as part of spurning mythology in lieu of science, credited with "know thyself", math that led to the school of Pythagoras (via Anaximander), and I think he invented venture capital by investing in other's olive presses for a tribute.

wirrbel• 3 years ago

Leibnitz did come up with the differential equations so he took math one level further actually than newton.

From mathematical perspective Carl Friedrich Gauss is also someone to consider.

Overall i don’t think it makes sense to look for THE most intelligent individual, it certainly depends on the evaluation criteria and is thus subjective.

notresidenter• 3 years ago

Fig newtons are named after a small town in Massachusetts, not the scientist.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

Besides Newton, my other contender is von Neumann.

He also helped created so many fields and branches of knowledge.

Einstein is actually overrated in my opinion, compared to Newton and von Neumann.

deadbeeves• 3 years ago

I was thinking the same. Reading about von Neumann is humbling.

I don't think Einstein is overrated. The ideas he put forward were pretty out-of-the-box. von Neumann was for sure a more diverse thinker, but it's hard to argue that his contributions were more impactful than Einstein's.

hackandthink• 3 years ago

Would like to read:

Ed Regis: Who Got Einstein's Office?: Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1088138.Who_Got_Einstein...

fiforpg2• 3 years ago

It is not that Einstein is overrated, but rather that many people entertaining the usual ideas about his genius are blissfully unaware of his contemporaries and their work: Poincaré, Lorentz, Minkowski. Then of course Newton had Hooke, who figured out gravitation for him, and Leibniz who had some of the same insights in calculus.

History of science is richer and more entertaining than the Einstein this and Einstein that — with all due respect to the man.

mmmm2• 3 years ago

Von Neumann is the guy "regular" geniuses cite as otherworldly.

- Foundations of computer architecture. - Game theory - Statistics - Quantum Mechanics

I'm short selling him here.

He also worked out the calculations for the explosive lens for the atomic bomb. My understanding is that was quite difficult and it's unclear who else could have done that.

ppsreejith• 3 years ago

For the given title, it's surprising that no non-Europeans are mentioned or non-STEM for that matter. Some other contenders could be:

1. Su Song

2. Plato

3. Gautama

4. Zhang Heng

5. Bhaskara(I/II)

6. Al Biruni

7. Da Vinci

8. Al Khwarizmi

tgv• 3 years ago

From the article:

William Shakespeare or Ludwig van Beethoven

And the author explains why the others don't qualify, in his opinion.

OTOH, he also mentions that Newton was autistic, without any bloody evidence, except the buzzfeed remark that he was reclusive.

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

How about Ramanujan? (A mathematician, obviously, but not European.)

sdwr• 3 years ago

He falls more towards the idiot savant side for me. Not because he was necessarily dumb, but he channeled his intelligence in such useless ways. All raw intellect, and no cohesion, theme or application.

I read his story as a cautionary tale, along with Euler, someone to be pitied.

Plato, Da Vinci, Einstein tried to make sense of the bigger picture. They grounded their intellect in the real world.

karmakaze3• 3 years ago

Came to say the same. For those thinking that his works were "too far out there", they were merely ahead of our time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

Of his thousands of results, all but a dozen or two have now been proven correct.

inglor_cz• 3 years ago

It is somewhat depressing to realize that the disease that killed him would be easily treatable now. And we would have results of 40+ extra years of his productivity.

throw0101c• 3 years ago

2. Plato

I'd lean more towards Aristotle.

johndhi• 3 years ago

Da Vinci isn't European?

mst• 3 years ago

I think also Archimedes, especially given he meets the polymath part of the author's approach.

NSufi• 3 years ago

In my opinion, Einstein's theories were much more profound and revolutionary than Newton's ideas. Also, Einstein seems to be much more mentally stable and "normal". The fact that calculus was independently invented by two scientists simultaneously just confirms that it was a natural progression of the mathematical ideas published just a few years earlier.

natas• 3 years ago

I am shocked not to see Erdos mentioned.

more_corn• 3 years ago

Fully half of his life was wasted on theological bullshit. Imagine what he could have contributed if this cancer on humanity hadn’t been force-fed to him since he could speak.

traject_• 3 years ago

There were actually metaphysical materialists similar to Machiavelli in Newton's time who were paragons of something similar to atheist thought and were free of " this cancer on humanity". But it's telling that none of them ended up developing anything of worth in the natural sciences and anyone who knows their philosophy would know why that's the case.

dang• 3 years ago

Please don't start religious flamewars on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

Reeding on coin edges predated Newton by 2 centuries; although he implemented it as Master of the Royal Mint, he did not invent the idea.

https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/dictionarydetail/516601

The 'Real Clear' family of websites (news, politics, science) is mostly low quality clickbait. This is an amusing article but the quality level is low.

gibsonf1• 3 years ago

Aristotle

fiforpg2• 3 years ago

Human history neglects many bright minds, while showering praise on others, whose main achievement occasionally is just that — they managed to get their name attached to a discovery.

On a less bitter note I would like to collectively nominate ancient Greece for the smartest culture that ever existed, and here is a quote from Bertrand Russell illustrating this point:

The guesses of the Pythagoreans in astronomy, of Anaximander and Empedocles in biological evolution, and of Democritus as to the atomic constitution of matter, provided the men of science in later times with hypotheses which, but for the philosophers, might never have entered their heads.

karmakaze3• 3 years ago

I like the discussions, but the idea of 'smartest' is dumb, for people to be pondering.

There are original singular ideas/proofs which shake our world, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Each such case is incomparable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

This particular article may as well as said IQ, which is biased nonsense:

Implicit in this definition of intelligence is general knowledge.

Why is this requirement there? So that this most intelligent being is still "like us"?

karmakaze3• 3 years ago

I would add Richard Feynman to this discussion, not because he created earth shattering discoveries, but because he was able to understand so many things deeply and communicate them in the simplest possible terms, at times back to the experts debating the topic within their respective fields.

O1111OOO• 3 years ago

Article: "Sadly, despite his fame, Isaac Newton led a very lonely life."

Seems like the author projecting his own limited standards. Newton could have been extremely content in his work, in his own space.

Article: "his reclusive and anti-social nature strongly suggest that he was autistic"

It doesn't suggest that at all. This is another huge leap by the author. Newton was more likely an introvert. He was certainly very passionate about his work and the many adventures of the mind.

The points above don't detract from the article (Newton is among the easier picks, easy article to write) but the sloppy thinking by the author does irk quite a bit.

The Smartest Person Who Ever Lived (2015)

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