Carl Friedrich Gauss contributed to many fields of science, he wasn't just a brilliant mathematician. One of the most obvious staggering geniuses in history.
So much fundamental shit is named after him that they needed to basically include the name of whoever was in the room with him, just so you wouldn't get it confused.
"Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler."
Yes! In fact the kickflip is often erroneously attributed to Rodney Mullen, where in actual fact it was known as the "Eulerflip" for almost 300 years before its 'reinvention'.
Interestingly, in his own way, Rodney Mullen could be a serious answer to this question in his field. Very few people have singlehandedly revolutionized their realm the way Mullen did.
He basically invented modern skateboarding nearly in its entirety as a young teenager. Almost every skateboard trick was either invented by Mullen or is a descendent or modification of one of his tricks. There are a few that some argue others were doing primitive versions of a couple years earlier, but he was always the first to be able to reproduce these tricks flawlessly, consistently and on demand.
He didn't stop there, either... Mullen continued inventing batshit crazy tricks nobody had conceived of well into his 30s.
He also basically invented the modern skateboard... He started out on an old school flat board a la back to the future, and modified it over time to have upturned ends, flexible trucks, more grip, and a narrower body, features that are standard on modern street skateboards.
It's like if Michael Jordan invented the dribble, the dunk, the layup, the three point throw, and invented the net on the fucking hoop. Mullen is an insane once in a generation prodigy.
Well this just sent me down a rabbit hole of Mullen and he’s actually insanely smart outside of skateboarding too! He’s a Director’s Fellow at the MIT media lab and a distinguished research scholar at the Smithsonian Institute.
Definitely. Very wise and gentle man. It's clear that he contemplates absolutely everything he does with a level of detail and clarity that's quite unique. His mind is one of a kind.
I don't even skate but he's always fascinated me. He's a literal living legend and I'm genuinely not sure anyone alive today can claim to have contributed more to their field than Rodney.
Can you think of anyone who's done more for a phenomenon as massive and culturally significant as skateboarding? I can't really think of anyone else alive who truly pulled an entire world-famous physical art out of thin air like that.
Why is no-one mentioning that Euler also became totally blind which didn't in any way hamper his researches or questing mind? He said he preferred it that way because '...fewer distractions'.
Not only that. But since he was becoming blind, he learned to memory all relevant books in his house, so he could recollect what he need once he was blind. Fucking insane
Not sure how important it is, but unifying e, pi, the imaginary unit, the additive identity and the multiplicative identity in a small equation is really elegant.
Came here to say this - we owe so much to ei*pi + 1 = 0 and relationship between a complex spinning vector and projection onto orthogonal complex sin / cos waves - radio/wireless/cellular modulation schemes for one.
When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality.[388]
...
In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision. The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour. As Eugene Wigner tells it,[390] Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series."[391]
My favorite is how I think it was Edward Teller - a physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb - noted how Von Neumann talked with Teller’s 3 year old child. Neumann got down to his level and treated the child like an equal.
And Teller wondered if that’s how von Neumann treated him as well.
You know you are an amazing Physicist when other Physicists hold you in high regard like Von Neumann, Fermi was supposed to be like this- solving unpublished problems
My favorite is the genesis of the Fermi Paradox. Apparently someone was explaining the Drake Equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation?wprov=sfti1) to Fermi. Fermi, immediately understanding that even the most conservative estimates for each factor in the Drake Equation would leave us with millions of detectable civilizations, just in the Milky Way alone, was said to have turned to his lecturer and said “So where is everybody?”
Interestingly, Wigner Jenő was also Hungarian. One of the few people we can be proud of nowadays. I mean, both of them passed away, but it’s nice to have people born in Hungary having contributed so much to science.
PS Teller Ende, too, who is mentioned in another comment below
“I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Wemer Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-Iaw; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. And I have known many of the brightest younger scientists. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me." -Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize, Physics in 1963)
Von Neumann was my first thought too. Reading anything about him makes it pretty clear he was a legitimate anomaly in human intelligence, like someone more evolved. The remarks from other legendary, world-redefining physicists of his era about how they still got the impression that they were basically children compared to him on an intellectual level, are almost eerie.
Edit: "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man" - Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Hans Bethe
Reading about Bethe's own genius and accomplishments would make virtually anyone's head spin - but even he considered Von Neumann to be so far beyond himself and everyone else that he was almost like a different species.
Newton. He discovered calculus specifically because contemporary math couldn't handle the physics of how planets move. To prove his Law of Universal Gravitation he needed a tool to calculate things that are constantly changing, like a planet's speed and direction. By inventing calculus, Newton gave himself the precise mathematical language needed to define his Laws of Motion and prove that his gravity theory explained the entire universe, making the two breakthroughs one inseparable discovery. Add in his discovery that white light is not pure but is actually a mixture of all the colors of the visible spectrum and subsequent invention of the reflection telescope based on his understanding of light, and expanding the Binomial Theorem
I recently read that this is not entirely the case. The brain doesn’t go into aging and actual decline before 66, and is at its most stable between 32 and 66.
Nothing so easy to sus out. People like to jump to conclusions from a few specific passages in his letters, but it’s quite possible he was genuinely celibate his entire life.
Isn’t that Baruch Spinoza, maybe Newton did it too? I have looked it up and you are right. Spinoza ground lenses as a profession and I guess I imagined Newton would get someone else to do the graft.
Newton is certainly a strong contender, having figured out universal gravitation, invented/discovered calculus, and conducting his work in optics which included his analysis of chromatic light -- all by the age of 24.
It's true that Newton came up with calculus as a better way to explain his ideas about motion and universal gravitation, but when he published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 he used geometry because he anticipated that almost no one would be able to understand it if he used his calculus. It was much more difficult and laborious to demonstrate and prove his theories of motion using geometry, but he did manage it.
It's also worth mentioning that Newton's method of calculus was based on what he called "fluxions" and quite different in expression and notation from the calculus that we learn in high school and college today. The calculus created by Leibniz at the same time (they feuded over who discovered calculus first) is actually what we use today.
Bro I had an engineering class all year and like 3 years after calculus we used Liebniz notation as any sane person would. This fucker for the final switched to Newtons notation and expected us to use it as well. Failed that fuckin class. Fuck you Peter.
Can you say more about this? Which was it? (Or does that question really rest on a philosophical foundation, i.e. whether math is the structure of the universe or just a tool?)
Newton invented a particular way of stating certain universal truths that he had discovered about the universe.
Even more interesting is the fact that Gottfried Leibniz came up with a very similar system for expressing the same mathematical truths (with a slightly different framing) completely independently of Newton, at almost exactly the same time, and around 800km away.
It’s funny how this happens more often than you would think where two people in separate parts of the world come up with inventions or theories at the same time. Flight happened this way as well as nuclear power and the telephone, surely there are many other examples but those come to mind first.
When the world has a problem the most brilliant minds find the solution, often around the same time.
Because most discovieries happen in the shoulders of giants, Leibniz and Newton were likely reading the same authors that eventually inspired their discoveries.
That, and also that many inventions had to happen in a particular order. Like, the airplane could not have been invented if someone else had not invented a lightweight internal combustion engine of some sort, so as soon as we had the engine, a bunch of people were probably going to think “what if I strapped that to a mechanical bird?”
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. In term of math that no one used before, Newton "invented" calculus, a tool which could help express and maybe solve his problem. But in terms of whether it was meant to be expressed in the form of equations all along, then it would be a "discovery".
I think if you compare Newton to Einstein in a vacuum Einstein’s discovery was more “out of this world” than Newton’s. Newton described the physical world with mathematics where as Einstein was able to take his mind into a realm where the human mind simply does not have the intuition to observe the phenomena, general relativity is crazy, quantum phenomena also crazy.
That said, I think you have to put your thumb on the scale for earlier discoveries. Being a lone black sheep in the wilderness of ignorance and “seeing the matrix” the way Newton was able to… it was far more rare of a thing to happen. People didn’t live in a world where a discovery of the physical realm was even possible in that way.
It kinda makes me wonder if we go back to like the invention of controlled fire or clothing or something… how much weight do we put on that?
Clothing is certainly something we take for granted. But my takeaway here is that your top 3 smartest people ever list is: Newton, Einstein, and the first ape to make socks
The book entitled "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History" listed Newton as number 1 on account of how much changed because of his life work. It was published in 1978.
Couldn’t agree more. Quantum mechanics is so trendy in the public eye but Maxwells work in E&M was so far ahead of its time and the basis for most of Einsteins work.
It’s kind of crazy how few people recognize the folks that paved the way for cell phones, modern networking, and communication networks as we know them today.
It's intentional you know. Pushing scientists and engineers behind entrepreneurs and businessmen and faceless brands. The point of consumerism is that when you have a need, there's someone to sell you a solution.
Not someone to teach you, or inspire you. Not an awareness to realize how many resources you're burning up, or whether you really need that new thing. Not an awareness of how that thing could negatively impact society or the planet. Not even an appreciation for the colossal effort, manpower, and infrastructure goes into the industry.
The first -- and ideally, only -- thing they want you to see is a price tag.
Von Neumann is a good shout based on direct quotes of like 50 of the smartest people who ever lived (some of which who could be contending answers for this question) all admitting that Von Neumann made them feel stupid.
My engineering professor said they had to start naming discoveries in math and science after the second person who discovered/proved them, otherwise every other thing would be named after Euler.
Von Neumann was one of three brothers. The other two lived to 82 and 100 respectively, while JvN died of cancer in his early fifties, possibly due to radiation exposure during the Manhattan project.
Looking at the list of his accomplishments, god only knows what else he would have been able to achieve in another three decades.
Since Einstein was born in the year that Maxwell died, I doubt Einstein ever met Maxwell and so he might have thought that Maxwell was the smartest and yet the Gödel quote could also be true.
That also doesn't include the list of things named after the person who discovered them after Euler, because he already had too many things named after him.
Von Neumann seems like a safe pick, considering how many of the smartest people ever across multiple disciplines seemed to be astonished at his intellect.
Edward Teller once saw Von Neumann interacting with Tellers 3 year old son. Von Neumann spoke with the small child as an equal and calibrated his vast intellect to make the interaction possible.
Teller says he had a chill when he realized upon watching this interaction that Von Neumann applied exactly the same principle when dealing with other scientists and brilliant men like Teller that we would consider geniuses.
Even the most brilliant minds were in some ways like children compared to Von Neumann.
People don’t quite understand just how ineffably brilliant Von Neumann was. He helped build one of the first computers. Basically helped construct the entirety of the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics, was one of the three highest contributing members of the Manhattan Project, and invented the entire field of game theory used during the Cold War to prevent nuclear war using the MAD principle. He has hundreds of publications, nearly all extremely technical and groundbreaking results.
He has hundreds of publications, nearly all extremely technical and groundbreaking results.
And those publications were also across a very wide range of subjects. There is a Wikipedia page just to list all of his publications, and it is not a small page.
Matjmetician Stan Ulam (whose list of scientific accomplishments is vast) said Neumann’s talents were other-worldly, and that he was the most gifted man he ever met.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
I think about this quote a lot. Especially when I think about all the people who died in war.
For example, perhaps the most important meteorologist of the twentieth century was Ted Fujita, who is most famous for his work at the University of Chicago, but was born Fujita Tetsuya in Fukuoka. During the war, Fujita was living in Kokura, which city was spared from atomic bombing on August 9, 1945 because it was cloudy (good luck for Kokura, bad luck for Nagasaki). In other words, we were, perhaps, one sunny day away from losing the man who discovered downbursts and microbursts, invented the Fujita scale (the “F” you see when you hear that a tornado was an “F-5” or similar stands for Fujita), and revolutionized the world’s understanding of severe weather.
Karl Schwarzschild came up with the concept of black holes by finding the strange solution to Einstein’s equations that describes them mathematically entirely on his own while fighting on the front in World War 1. He died less than a year later of an illness contracted in the trenches and didn’t live to see black holes proven to actually exist.
The size of the event horizon of a black hole is named the Schwarzschild Radius after him.
Similarly, I can only imagine Wilfred Owen would have been one of the poetic and literary giants of the 20th century, had he not been killed in the last week of that war.
Or maybe we would never have heard of him, his tragic death being part of what propelled his work into the public eye.
So much of an artist's work being noticed comes down to moments, timing and chance.
How many potentially great artists have given up on their dreams because these moments and opportunities never came to them?
After all, bills needed to be paid, and children fed. Dusty guitars and forgotten scribbled notes in the backs of closets representing the only trace of masterpieces that will never be.
For that matter, how many masterpieces have been completed, but never found their audience?
War fucking sucks, man. You lose so many creative people just in the Ukraine war alone. We’ve lost numerous artists, Olympians, and famous actors who sacrificed their lives fighting a needless war.
Tens of thousands of people. I've been there. Among the dead were thousands of children. Many of them were turned into grease stains in the shape of their own shadows. I cannot get it out of my head.
Not even just that. I've met so many highly intelligent individuals who are living miles below their potential, either because their self esteem and confidence is broken due to emotional trauma and years of someone close to them making them feel inferior and worthless, or due to mental illness, or even just because they never found their calling in life. The last one I think is huge. I've seen so many people who were massive underachievers their whole lives, only to excel far beyond what anyone thought they were capable of once they found their niche. I think there are far, far more gifted people out there than we realize, but sadly the society we've created does a poor job at lifting people up and helping them thrive.
Yes always hype people up for their natural abilities including caring, problem solving, being kind, instincts and creativity. Sometimes people get a little bashful or confused but I’ve seen it change lives. Recognize your fellow humans gifts.
I think about this all the time! When you look back in history, all over the world, where thousands or millions were killed.. and wonder, who could any of those people have been to humanity if they lived
That’s a great point. War is just another of endless circumstances that could prevent someone from realizing their potential. Not trying to give any weight to one or another, just pointing out the broader perspective.
Interesting to think about both sides... we likely lost a lot of positive potential, but also could have had a whole bunch more Hitlers and the like too... at the end of the day the current world and everyone/everything in it is what we have and we should do our best to work together to make it a better place.
As a software engineer it makes me sad how most of the great minds of our time spend their lives building apps to serve better ads or achieve relatively benign outcomes for tech companies.
I did not think of that. My coworkers are so fucking brilliant. Who knows what they could do if they did not think updating webpages was the most lucrative option.
Their minds should be solving other problems. Instead they work to setup bill parsers, api’s and getting Microsoft and amazon to talk to each other smoothly.
When I read “A Short History Of Nearly Everything” (which is a great and easily accessible book), one thing that stuck out to me was the number of sons of rich families who made these early discoveries. My guess would be the reasoning for that wasn’t that they were in any way the smartest, just they weren’t worrying about survival and were instead able to pursue scientific interests. Like you said, the truly great minds likely never got the chance to pursue such interests.
Because population growth has been exponential, a surprising amount of humans who have ever lived are alive today. I believe it's 8/109 billion. About half of all humans have lived since the year 1 AD. So it's somewhat likely that many of the smartest people of all time have been documented.
The extremely well-established link between childhood nutrition and illnesses and intelligence as an adult makes this, romantic as it may be, unlikely. Human intelligence has directly progressed with the rise of society, agriculture, sanitation, and the like.
Honestly, I bet the smartest person ever probably lived and died with few people remembering their name. If we are just basing this on pure intelligence, it was probably some anti-social savant that people thought was a hermit.
“Pure intelligence” would be an interesting stat to have…we could know with certainty who had the most brilliant, beautiful, profound thoughts on the human condition - but didn’t (or couldn’t) convey them to another in any way worthy of note.
To me, it sounds like a notion of enlightenment from Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, etc. As I understand, the enlightened ones in their ranks, particularly the “living liberated”, are not well known outside of those circles, their names only appearing in some never ending list that few will ever know about let alone read. Ashes to ashes.
But I think the op question implicitly relies on a given historic person’s output, as it’s really the only way to debate this idea with any meaning? I doubt most people share my zeal for Indian monastic wisdom, da vinci’s inventions were cooler…
Poor Indian kid derived a great majority of mathematic proofs with just a paper sized chalk board in a slum. He had very little access to math books, and whatever he books he did have assumed a lot of knowledge he didn’t have, so he recreated it himself so he could understand.
Can you imagine?!? Thousands of years of mathematicians banging their heads against a wall to come up with this stuff and he’s like “ugh. I don’t get this. It says something about A to Z and I need all the steps in between. I’ll just make it myself…”
He sent a couple letters to some universities in Britain along with some of those proofs and the professors were so blown away they thought he was a scam, but the math was solid and done in a way they haven’t seen before. So they sent for him to come to Britain.
There, he came up with the craziest math that we, to this day, don’t fully appreciate and are finding applications far beyond the tech of his time.
EDIT:
If you haven’t heard of him, here’s a little video by Veritasium
No one is appreciating that the guy did long complicated proofs on a little chalk board instead of paper. Anyone who’s done Calc 3 or higher knows what a PITA it is solving a problem on a single sheet, much less pages and pages in higher maths.
After his death, lots of his early work died with him because he didn’t write it down or know the proper notation at the time.
He’s a reminder why we need early childhood education, school lunches, social support, and school supplies.
There are a few humble geniuses critical to human progress: James Dalton, James Croll, Michael Faraday, George W Carver, Mary Anning, Ada Yonath, Carl Gauss, Hertha Ayrton
I thought of Ramanujan and I was pleasantly surprised this is one of the top answers. Guy really lived in a whole different plane, shame he died so young.
Underrated mathematician is G. H Hardy. Poor guy tried his best to help Ramanujan, by publishing and making Ramanujan’s work well known in academia, and also sponsoring his trip to London. But Ramanujan’s immunity was weak, and couldn’t get used to living there, but was always dedicated to his work.
Even on his deathbed due to an illness, he was constantly working on mathematics and corresponding letters with G. H. Hardy.
Not really, or not as much as you'd think. It's a VERY modern development that artists are "artsy" and not sciency.
Are is all about math, dimensions, lenses, chemistry, engineering. Just a ton of science was in art for most of human history. Further, there's an entire term for people like this, Renaissance Man. There are uncountably many.
He's one of my favorite historical figures and has an incredible and curious mind. He basically collected knowledge. Sometimes he brought his own interpretation to it. Sometimes he just documented it. He was obviously brilliant but a lot of what has been attributed to him, may simply be because he documented it.
Oliver Heaviside.
He reshaped Maxwell’s equations into the form we still use today. That alone would put him in the top tier of minds, but the insane part is he had no formal education beyond the age of 16. No university training, no famous mentors, no academic pipeline. He taught himself advanced mathematics and physics from scratch.
Einstein, Newton, Maxwell and others in the comments all had access to formal education and teachers. Heaviside did it alone, at least to best of my knowledge. Genius is impressive, but self-taught genius that permanently alters a field is on another level.
TBF Einstein was largely self taught, he had school and a personal tutor but the latter said that by the time Albert was 14 he couldn't teach him any more or follow his maths. That's not unusual for prodigies, so it's more about access to materials than the formal education, which is too easy for them as it's intended for normal people.
Ramanujan was another who was basically self-taught, who was living in quite poor conditions when he came to the attention of British professors.
Probably a lot of people who unfortunatly werent allowed to flourish, and probably a lot of people who were.
There are a lot of skilled, talented, and smart people with a lot of potential out there but they unfortunatly arent given the right circumstances, or are prevented in some way from reaching that public notoriety to be called "one of the -yadda yadda yadda" people in the world.
I have seen and known many a man who can sing better than some of the top tier musical artists, people who can paint or who have better concepts than people who's art is hung is galleries worth millions, people who's comedy, voice work, or acting is on par with or better than those that currently are well known in the respective industries, those that have minds capable of invention, creativity, improvisation, or otherwise but simply lack the money, the means, the location, the background, the connections, the publicity, maybe even the drive because life beats them down to the point of exaustion, or even just the time to be where they could/ should be.
The smartest guy I ever met intentionally blew his life up because it all felt too complicated. Last I heard he was a garbage man. Which, so you don't take me wrong, is an important job. I'd trade 100 bankers for one garbage man. But he liked that the job didn't require anything of him.
He first estimated the Earth's circumference around 240 B.C.. He did this by measuring the angle of the sun's rays in two different cities and using the distance between them to calculate the Earth's total circumference. His estimation was surprisingly accurate for its time. Absolute genius
He was insanely smart but certainly not the smartest in history. His calculation used existing geometric principles that many Greek mathematicians knew, it’s just that he put the effort into actually measuring (by hiring a professional walker) and calculating.
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie, known as Marie Curie. She was born in Warsaw, Poland and moved to Paris at the age of 24, where she studied in Sorbonne.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
She was not only very smart but also caring, beautiful human being.
The true smartest person in history will always be unknown.
However Archimedes is a genius that other geniuses explicitly acknowledge as their superior. Galileo called him superhuman. And yeah you look at his accomplishments and how the hell did he figure out so much? He clearly just had a natural talent for science.
He wrote the laws of motion, invented calculus to calculate orbital trajectories, and discovered that white light was made of all of the colors of the rainbow. He did all of this without outside help.
But in terms of just raw talent and absolute "smartness" -- Ramanujan. He almost defies the Goulder quote of "how many died in sweatshops and cotton fields" -- that was basically him, and yet he made it out
Put simply, Ramanujan in the right setting would have been #1. Shame he died so early
Felt like I had to scroll too far for this one. That was one who just...could intuit esoteric mathematical truths out of nowhere. It's perhaps a narrow definition of "smart", but he clearly had an exceptional mind.
Isaac Newton straight up invented his own math in addition to discovering the laws of physics. This term is thrown around way too much but in this case I think it applies.
“They probably lived as a humble farmer” and “there wasn’t ONE smartest person” aside, here are some profoundly intelligent people from history (not people I agree with or who had the best ideas, just people I think were/are utter geniuses):
Descartes
Newton
Leibniz
Aristotle
Bertrand Russell
Ruth Millikan
David Chalmers
Jon Von Neumann
Gödel
Marvin Minsky
Noam Chomsky
John McCarthy
Immanuel Kant
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Alfred North Whitehead
Gottlob Frege
Ada Lovelace
Katelin Balog
Alan Newell
Herbert Simon
Edit: Let me reiterate that the post asked for the “smartest” person. Not the most well-known. Not the most correct. Anyone who inquires in good fairh about lesser known figures like Balog will get an interesting answer when I have time. Anyone who inquires in good faith about the inclusion of Chomsky (whose status for some reason appears to be controversial among YouTube-educated Redditors) will get an answer when I’m free. Anyone else who comes at me with an attitude and clearly isn’t highly educated in the works of these individuals will be blocked, because I genuinely don’t consider your thoughts or your personality disorder to be useful.
Bofadees, the Greek mathematician. He unfortunately died early of testicular cancer before most of his work could be truly appreciated but I bet most of you have never heard of Bofadees nuts.
Carl Friedrich Gauss contributed to many fields of science, he wasn't just a brilliant mathematician. One of the most obvious staggering geniuses in history.
When informed his wife was dying and to come
"I am busy, tell her to wait"
Also forbade his son from entering the field of mathematics, as it would sully the family name.
Art + artist, and all that.
So he was a dickhead. Good to know
The phrase for such people could be:
"[He] was a great man, but not necessarily a good man."
Apparently this is a fact made up by Asimov tho
Asimov must have hated him then
Usually wikipedia just list the stuff you discovered in your page.
Gauss needed a whole page just to list stuff named after him.
So much fundamental shit is named after him that they needed to basically include the name of whoever was in the room with him, just so you wouldn't get it confused.
He was so powerful that science had to invent the Degausser.
Euler
Hands down its Euler. After some time they even stopped naming things after him, since he discovered so much! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Leonhard_Euler
"Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them after Euler."
I love that
That's a humbling read as a 40 year old who constantly suffers from imposter syndrome. I can do a kickflip though. Could Euler do a kickflip?
Yes! In fact the kickflip is often erroneously attributed to Rodney Mullen, where in actual fact it was known as the "Eulerflip" for almost 300 years before its 'reinvention'.
Interestingly, in his own way, Rodney Mullen could be a serious answer to this question in his field. Very few people have singlehandedly revolutionized their realm the way Mullen did.
He basically invented modern skateboarding nearly in its entirety as a young teenager. Almost every skateboard trick was either invented by Mullen or is a descendent or modification of one of his tricks. There are a few that some argue others were doing primitive versions of a couple years earlier, but he was always the first to be able to reproduce these tricks flawlessly, consistently and on demand.
He didn't stop there, either... Mullen continued inventing batshit crazy tricks nobody had conceived of well into his 30s.
He also basically invented the modern skateboard... He started out on an old school flat board a la back to the future, and modified it over time to have upturned ends, flexible trucks, more grip, and a narrower body, features that are standard on modern street skateboards.
It's like if Michael Jordan invented the dribble, the dunk, the layup, the three point throw, and invented the net on the fucking hoop. Mullen is an insane once in a generation prodigy.
Well this just sent me down a rabbit hole of Mullen and he’s actually insanely smart outside of skateboarding too! He’s a Director’s Fellow at the MIT media lab and a distinguished research scholar at the Smithsonian Institute.
Definitely. Very wise and gentle man. It's clear that he contemplates absolutely everything he does with a level of detail and clarity that's quite unique. His mind is one of a kind.
Absolutely thrilled to have yet again turned a Reddit thread into a Rodney Mullen worship party. Pure creative spirit on a plank of wood.
I don't even skate but he's always fascinated me. He's a literal living legend and I'm genuinely not sure anyone alive today can claim to have contributed more to their field than Rodney.
Can you think of anyone who's done more for a phenomenon as massive and culturally significant as skateboarding? I can't really think of anyone else alive who truly pulled an entire world-famous physical art out of thin air like that.
He discovered the kickflip.
Well the person it's named after, Tony Kick, performed the move following Euler's guidance. Make of that what you will.
Yeah there is a saying that if you had to guess who made a mathematical theorem its probably correct if you say euler.
Why is no-one mentioning that Euler also became totally blind which didn't in any way hamper his researches or questing mind? He said he preferred it that way because '...fewer distractions'.
Not only that. But since he was becoming blind, he learned to memory all relevant books in his house, so he could recollect what he need once he was blind. Fucking insane
That’s fucking metal
This is actually one of Euler's theorems, maybe.
And still people don't recognize the name!
man this fucker invented e
Not sure how important it is, but unifying e, pi, the imaginary unit, the additive identity and the multiplicative identity in a small equation is really elegant.
Came here to say this - we owe so much to ei*pi + 1 = 0 and relationship between a complex spinning vector and projection onto orthogonal complex sin / cos waves - radio/wireless/cellular modulation schemes for one.
I was about to say that
Yeah. This is the most obvious one. Euler had something going on in that brain that is rare.
So far down, this man. There is hardly any math problem that Euler didn't think and found a solution for, even today
Damn he must be more than 300 years old, now.
Hahaha, yeah, that's on me. We still run into math problems and the first thing mathematicians think of is "I bet Euler wrote something about this"
O’Euler Rules
Jon von Neumann, Euler, Newton.
From his wikipedia page, my two favorite von Neumann stories:
My favorite is how I think it was Edward Teller - a physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb - noted how Von Neumann talked with Teller’s 3 year old child. Neumann got down to his level and treated the child like an equal.
And Teller wondered if that’s how von Neumann treated him as well.
You know you are an amazing Physicist when other Physicists hold you in high regard like Von Neumann, Fermi was supposed to be like this- solving unpublished problems
My favorite is the genesis of the Fermi Paradox. Apparently someone was explaining the Drake Equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation?wprov=sfti1) to Fermi. Fermi, immediately understanding that even the most conservative estimates for each factor in the Drake Equation would leave us with millions of detectable civilizations, just in the Milky Way alone, was said to have turned to his lecturer and said “So where is everybody?”
Ha! What a great—and humbling—thing to realise! 😅
Interestingly, Wigner Jenő was also Hungarian. One of the few people we can be proud of nowadays. I mean, both of them passed away, but it’s nice to have people born in Hungary having contributed so much to science. PS Teller Ende, too, who is mentioned in another comment below
“I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Wemer Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-Iaw; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. And I have known many of the brightest younger scientists. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me." -Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize, Physics in 1963)
Von Neumann proposed a computer architecture in 1945 which we still use the basis of today, 80 years later.
Von Neumann was my first thought too. Reading anything about him makes it pretty clear he was a legitimate anomaly in human intelligence, like someone more evolved. The remarks from other legendary, world-redefining physicists of his era about how they still got the impression that they were basically children compared to him on an intellectual level, are almost eerie.
Edit: "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man" - Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Hans Bethe
Reading about Bethe's own genius and accomplishments would make virtually anyone's head spin - but even he considered Von Neumann to be so far beyond himself and everyone else that he was almost like a different species.
I came to say von Neumann
Newton. He discovered calculus specifically because contemporary math couldn't handle the physics of how planets move. To prove his Law of Universal Gravitation he needed a tool to calculate things that are constantly changing, like a planet's speed and direction. By inventing calculus, Newton gave himself the precise mathematical language needed to define his Laws of Motion and prove that his gravity theory explained the entire universe, making the two breakthroughs one inseparable discovery. Add in his discovery that white light is not pure but is actually a mixture of all the colors of the visible spectrum and subsequent invention of the reflection telescope based on his understanding of light, and expanding the Binomial Theorem
Then he turned 26. Or something like that.
It's super interesting how a lot of life's great ideas have been contemplated and discovered by 26-27 year old folks.
That’s when our brains are still ripe and can best make use of all the information we stuff into since age 3. It’s all downhill after you hit 30.
I recently read that this is not entirely the case. The brain doesn’t go into aging and actual decline before 66, and is at its most stable between 32 and 66.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgl6klez226o.amp
Thank you for making me feel better about my 37 year old brain at 4 am
lol, literally same. solidarity
although if it’s not gonna get any better from here, that’s a little alarming
That's why we invented LSD
Thanks for reminding me, that I am turning 31 today :(
I'm 45 and my brain is basically a ball of rice crispies by now.
No wonder he died a virgin
But he never got married! So that definitely makes him a genius and a strong contender right there.
Did he have a "roommate" or something?
He was deeply religious, possibly celibate
Nothing so easy to sus out. People like to jump to conclusions from a few specific passages in his letters, but it’s quite possible he was genuinely celibate his entire life.
There are two men in Newton’s history that he may have been in love with: John Wickens in his early life and Nicolas Fatio de Duillier later.
He grinded his own lenses. That's fairly epic
Now I feel bad about myself. I can’t even grind my own coffee! 😩
I believe in you, Ken Hill! Hank would say you should read the manual first.
Isn’t that Baruch Spinoza, maybe Newton did it too? I have looked it up and you are right. Spinoza ground lenses as a profession and I guess I imagined Newton would get someone else to do the graft.
Newton is certainly a strong contender, having figured out universal gravitation, invented/discovered calculus, and conducting his work in optics which included his analysis of chromatic light -- all by the age of 24.
It's true that Newton came up with calculus as a better way to explain his ideas about motion and universal gravitation, but when he published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 he used geometry because he anticipated that almost no one would be able to understand it if he used his calculus. It was much more difficult and laborious to demonstrate and prove his theories of motion using geometry, but he did manage it.
It's also worth mentioning that Newton's method of calculus was based on what he called "fluxions" and quite different in expression and notation from the calculus that we learn in high school and college today. The calculus created by Leibniz at the same time (they feuded over who discovered calculus first) is actually what we use today.
Bro I had an engineering class all year and like 3 years after calculus we used Liebniz notation as any sane person would. This fucker for the final switched to Newtons notation and expected us to use it as well. Failed that fuckin class. Fuck you Peter.
Best part of Leibniz is you can move it between both sides. Half of engineering maths wouldn't work without it.
Also partial derivatives.
Newton invented/discovered calculus
Can you say more about this? Which was it? (Or does that question really rest on a philosophical foundation, i.e. whether math is the structure of the universe or just a tool?)
Newton invented a particular way of stating certain universal truths that he had discovered about the universe.
Even more interesting is the fact that Gottfried Leibniz came up with a very similar system for expressing the same mathematical truths (with a slightly different framing) completely independently of Newton, at almost exactly the same time, and around 800km away.
It’s funny how this happens more often than you would think where two people in separate parts of the world come up with inventions or theories at the same time. Flight happened this way as well as nuclear power and the telephone, surely there are many other examples but those come to mind first.
When the world has a problem the most brilliant minds find the solution, often around the same time.
Because most discovieries happen in the shoulders of giants, Leibniz and Newton were likely reading the same authors that eventually inspired their discoveries.
That, and also that many inventions had to happen in a particular order. Like, the airplane could not have been invented if someone else had not invented a lightweight internal combustion engine of some sort, so as soon as we had the engine, a bunch of people were probably going to think “what if I strapped that to a mechanical bird?”
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. In term of math that no one used before, Newton "invented" calculus, a tool which could help express and maybe solve his problem. But in terms of whether it was meant to be expressed in the form of equations all along, then it would be a "discovery".
I think if you compare Newton to Einstein in a vacuum Einstein’s discovery was more “out of this world” than Newton’s. Newton described the physical world with mathematics where as Einstein was able to take his mind into a realm where the human mind simply does not have the intuition to observe the phenomena, general relativity is crazy, quantum phenomena also crazy.
That said, I think you have to put your thumb on the scale for earlier discoveries. Being a lone black sheep in the wilderness of ignorance and “seeing the matrix” the way Newton was able to… it was far more rare of a thing to happen. People didn’t live in a world where a discovery of the physical realm was even possible in that way.
It kinda makes me wonder if we go back to like the invention of controlled fire or clothing or something… how much weight do we put on that?
Imagine being literally the only person being able to understand something; he peered into a void where others saw nothing and deciphered structure
Imagine being literally a monkey and tying a rock to a stick. lol
Small correction, but given the context of the thread I thought I'd offer it..."Deciphering"*
Clothing is certainly something we take for granted. But my takeaway here is that your top 3 smartest people ever list is: Newton, Einstein, and the first ape to make socks
“If he's so smart, then how come is he dead?” Simpson a quote : )
The book entitled "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History" listed Newton as number 1 on account of how much changed because of his life work. It was published in 1978.
Terrible investor.
James Clerk-Maxwell, that's who Einstein said it was
Couldn’t agree more. Quantum mechanics is so trendy in the public eye but Maxwells work in E&M was so far ahead of its time and the basis for most of Einsteins work.
The father of my profession!
It’s kind of crazy how few people recognize the folks that paved the way for cell phones, modern networking, and communication networks as we know them today.
People are generally pretty removed about the biggest forces of how things work. It’s pretty interesting.
Food, tech, infrastructure, supply chains, science/math ideas
It's intentional you know. Pushing scientists and engineers behind entrepreneurs and businessmen and faceless brands. The point of consumerism is that when you have a need, there's someone to sell you a solution.
Not someone to teach you, or inspire you. Not an awareness to realize how many resources you're burning up, or whether you really need that new thing. Not an awareness of how that thing could negatively impact society or the planet. Not even an appreciation for the colossal effort, manpower, and infrastructure goes into the industry.
The first -- and ideally, only -- thing they want you to see is a price tag.
Euler is the real answer. If you know you know.
Von Neumann is a good shout based on direct quotes of like 50 of the smartest people who ever lived (some of which who could be contending answers for this question) all admitting that Von Neumann made them feel stupid.
My engineering professor said they had to start naming discoveries in math and science after the second person who discovered/proved them, otherwise every other thing would be named after Euler.
They named a Texas football team after Euler.
That's how I learned to pronounce Euler.
Von Neumann was one of three brothers. The other two lived to 82 and 100 respectively, while JvN died of cancer in his early fifties, possibly due to radiation exposure during the Manhattan project.
Looking at the list of his accomplishments, god only knows what else he would have been able to achieve in another three decades.
Euler is the GOAT mathematician for sure. He revolutionized almost every field of math.
I thought Einstein said Gödel was the smartest person he had ever met.
Since Einstein was born in the year that Maxwell died, I doubt Einstein ever met Maxwell and so he might have thought that Maxwell was the smartest and yet the Gödel quote could also be true.
Me but I don’t go making a big deal out of it.
So modest. Some would say the most modest.
Noone is as modest as he.
I am, goddammit! Nobody is as modest as me, and I’m also the best at telling people about it.
That guy. Also the most humble.
Came here looking for this, had you not said it I would have.
Newton or John Von Neumann
Those are two of my top 3, but gotta have Euler in there as well.
He has a list. Well, the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Leonhard_Euler
That also doesn't include the list of things named after the person who discovered them after Euler, because he already had too many things named after him.
Euler Column Buckling equation is my favorite, he literally just showed up and defined mathematically how a ton of shit in nature behaved. Amazing.
Great point.
Von Neumann seems like a safe pick, considering how many of the smartest people ever across multiple disciplines seemed to be astonished at his intellect.
Leonhard Euler is in the running, too.
My money is on Von Neumann. Even other incredibly smart scientists / mathematicians were intimidated by his intellect.
[edit: spelling]
Edward Teller once saw Von Neumann interacting with Tellers 3 year old son. Von Neumann spoke with the small child as an equal and calibrated his vast intellect to make the interaction possible.
Teller says he had a chill when he realized upon watching this interaction that Von Neumann applied exactly the same principle when dealing with other scientists and brilliant men like Teller that we would consider geniuses.
Even the most brilliant minds were in some ways like children compared to Von Neumann.
Yeah. This is my favorite Von Neumann anecdote.
People don’t quite understand just how ineffably brilliant Von Neumann was. He helped build one of the first computers. Basically helped construct the entirety of the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics, was one of the three highest contributing members of the Manhattan Project, and invented the entire field of game theory used during the Cold War to prevent nuclear war using the MAD principle. He has hundreds of publications, nearly all extremely technical and groundbreaking results.
And those publications were also across a very wide range of subjects. There is a Wikipedia page just to list all of his publications, and it is not a small page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_John_von_Neumann
Matjmetician Stan Ulam (whose list of scientific accomplishments is vast) said Neumann’s talents were other-worldly, and that he was the most gifted man he ever met.
I read this as ‘Newton John’ and yeah I think Xanadu was a pretty good song
No, it wasn't, but she was smart enough to do an aerobics song and video just as aerobics exploded and rode that wave for the rest of her life.
We have no idea because they probably lived their life hunting buffalo or harvesting crops in a field.
Stephen Jay Gould
One of my favorite quotes!
I think about this quote a lot. Especially when I think about all the people who died in war.
For example, perhaps the most important meteorologist of the twentieth century was Ted Fujita, who is most famous for his work at the University of Chicago, but was born Fujita Tetsuya in Fukuoka. During the war, Fujita was living in Kokura, which city was spared from atomic bombing on August 9, 1945 because it was cloudy (good luck for Kokura, bad luck for Nagasaki). In other words, we were, perhaps, one sunny day away from losing the man who discovered downbursts and microbursts, invented the Fujita scale (the “F” you see when you hear that a tornado was an “F-5” or similar stands for Fujita), and revolutionized the world’s understanding of severe weather.
Who did we lose at Nagasaki instead?
Karl Schwarzschild came up with the concept of black holes by finding the strange solution to Einstein’s equations that describes them mathematically entirely on his own while fighting on the front in World War 1. He died less than a year later of an illness contracted in the trenches and didn’t live to see black holes proven to actually exist.
The size of the event horizon of a black hole is named the Schwarzschild Radius after him.
Similarly, I can only imagine Wilfred Owen would have been one of the poetic and literary giants of the 20th century, had he not been killed in the last week of that war.
Or maybe we would never have heard of him, his tragic death being part of what propelled his work into the public eye.
So much of an artist's work being noticed comes down to moments, timing and chance.
How many potentially great artists have given up on their dreams because these moments and opportunities never came to them?
After all, bills needed to be paid, and children fed. Dusty guitars and forgotten scribbled notes in the backs of closets representing the only trace of masterpieces that will never be.
For that matter, how many masterpieces have been completed, but never found their audience?
War fucking sucks, man. You lose so many creative people just in the Ukraine war alone. We’ve lost numerous artists, Olympians, and famous actors who sacrificed their lives fighting a needless war.
Think of all the brilliant minds we’ve lost to hunger
Tens of thousands of people. I've been there. Among the dead were thousands of children. Many of them were turned into grease stains in the shape of their own shadows. I cannot get it out of my head.
Can’t remember who said it and also paraphrasing but also ‘the largest collection of inventions and works of art is in the graveyard’.
Not even just that. I've met so many highly intelligent individuals who are living miles below their potential, either because their self esteem and confidence is broken due to emotional trauma and years of someone close to them making them feel inferior and worthless, or due to mental illness, or even just because they never found their calling in life. The last one I think is huge. I've seen so many people who were massive underachievers their whole lives, only to excel far beyond what anyone thought they were capable of once they found their niche. I think there are far, far more gifted people out there than we realize, but sadly the society we've created does a poor job at lifting people up and helping them thrive.
I’m not saying I’m highly intelligent but this hurts so much. Nobody thought I’d end up such a loser. Especially not me. Trauma sucks.
Yes always hype people up for their natural abilities including caring, problem solving, being kind, instincts and creativity. Sometimes people get a little bashful or confused but I’ve seen it change lives. Recognize your fellow humans gifts.
I think about this all the time! When you look back in history, all over the world, where thousands or millions were killed.. and wonder, who could any of those people have been to humanity if they lived
If Tolkien had been killed at the Battle of Somme we wouldn't have gotten LotR, or for a wider butterfly effect, the entire modern Fantasy genre
But if Tolkien hadn’t been at the Somme we also wouldn’t have gotten LotR. Obviously war is bad, but fate is weird
That’s a great point. War is just another of endless circumstances that could prevent someone from realizing their potential. Not trying to give any weight to one or another, just pointing out the broader perspective.
Interesting to think about both sides... we likely lost a lot of positive potential, but also could have had a whole bunch more Hitlers and the like too... at the end of the day the current world and everyone/everything in it is what we have and we should do our best to work together to make it a better place.
As a software engineer it makes me sad how most of the great minds of our time spend their lives building apps to serve better ads or achieve relatively benign outcomes for tech companies.
I did not think of that. My coworkers are so fucking brilliant. Who knows what they could do if they did not think updating webpages was the most lucrative option.
Their minds should be solving other problems. Instead they work to setup bill parsers, api’s and getting Microsoft and amazon to talk to each other smoothly.
When I read “A Short History Of Nearly Everything” (which is a great and easily accessible book), one thing that stuck out to me was the number of sons of rich families who made these early discoveries. My guess would be the reasoning for that wasn’t that they were in any way the smartest, just they weren’t worrying about survival and were instead able to pursue scientific interests. Like you said, the truly great minds likely never got the chance to pursue such interests.
Rich or trade families even hundreds of years ago were often better educated than many college students today, relative for the time.
Because population growth has been exponential, a surprising amount of humans who have ever lived are alive today. I believe it's 8/109 billion. About half of all humans have lived since the year 1 AD. So it's somewhat likely that many of the smartest people of all time have been documented.
The extremely well-established link between childhood nutrition and illnesses and intelligence as an adult makes this, romantic as it may be, unlikely. Human intelligence has directly progressed with the rise of society, agriculture, sanitation, and the like.
Yep. People also forget just how much population has risen over time. A decent chunk of all human lives have occurred in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Honestly, I bet the smartest person ever probably lived and died with few people remembering their name. If we are just basing this on pure intelligence, it was probably some anti-social savant that people thought was a hermit.
“Pure intelligence” would be an interesting stat to have…we could know with certainty who had the most brilliant, beautiful, profound thoughts on the human condition - but didn’t (or couldn’t) convey them to another in any way worthy of note.
To me, it sounds like a notion of enlightenment from Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, etc. As I understand, the enlightened ones in their ranks, particularly the “living liberated”, are not well known outside of those circles, their names only appearing in some never ending list that few will ever know about let alone read. Ashes to ashes.
But I think the op question implicitly relies on a given historic person’s output, as it’s really the only way to debate this idea with any meaning? I doubt most people share my zeal for Indian monastic wisdom, da vinci’s inventions were cooler…
Reminds me of the show “sliders”. The professor is raging,
• No journals • No tenure • No committee • And yet… interdimensional travel, casually, in a basement
Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Poor Indian kid derived a great majority of mathematic proofs with just a paper sized chalk board in a slum. He had very little access to math books, and whatever he books he did have assumed a lot of knowledge he didn’t have, so he recreated it himself so he could understand.
Can you imagine?!? Thousands of years of mathematicians banging their heads against a wall to come up with this stuff and he’s like “ugh. I don’t get this. It says something about A to Z and I need all the steps in between. I’ll just make it myself…”
He sent a couple letters to some universities in Britain along with some of those proofs and the professors were so blown away they thought he was a scam, but the math was solid and done in a way they haven’t seen before. So they sent for him to come to Britain.
There, he came up with the craziest math that we, to this day, don’t fully appreciate and are finding applications far beyond the tech of his time.
EDIT:
If you haven’t heard of him, here’s a little video by Veritasium
https://youtu.be/fHRS_NOs24w
EDIT 2:
No one is appreciating that the guy did long complicated proofs on a little chalk board instead of paper. Anyone who’s done Calc 3 or higher knows what a PITA it is solving a problem on a single sheet, much less pages and pages in higher maths.
After his death, lots of his early work died with him because he didn’t write it down or know the proper notation at the time.
He’s a reminder why we need early childhood education, school lunches, social support, and school supplies.
There are a few humble geniuses critical to human progress: James Dalton, James Croll, Michael Faraday, George W Carver, Mary Anning, Ada Yonath, Carl Gauss, Hertha Ayrton
I thought of Ramanujan and I was pleasantly surprised this is one of the top answers. Guy really lived in a whole different plane, shame he died so young.
Him, Euler, Von Neumann are the ones other geniuses say are the real genius
Gauss is who my teachers always told me is the best mathematician, I'm not good enough to tell you my own opinion though
I think you are forgetting about Gauss and Grothendieck. Gauss in particular beggars belief.
Archimedes as well. Brilliant.
There's a movie about him.
The man who knew infinity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Infinity
Underrated mathematician is G. H Hardy. Poor guy tried his best to help Ramanujan, by publishing and making Ramanujan’s work well known in academia, and also sponsoring his trip to London. But Ramanujan’s immunity was weak, and couldn’t get used to living there, but was always dedicated to his work.
Even on his deathbed due to an illness, he was constantly working on mathematics and corresponding letters with G. H. Hardy.
Archimedes of Syracuse
Archimedes of New Jersey is always yapping about how he’s the smart one
Leonardo da Vinci
A world renowned engineer AND artist?
That is a VERY exclusive club.
Don’t forget teenage ninja as well.
Was he in a half-shell, perchance?
You can't just say perchance.
Not really, or not as much as you'd think. It's a VERY modern development that artists are "artsy" and not sciency.
Are is all about math, dimensions, lenses, chemistry, engineering. Just a ton of science was in art for most of human history. Further, there's an entire term for people like this, Renaissance Man. There are uncountably many.
Leonardo is absolute top notch, though.
He's one of my favorite historical figures and has an incredible and curious mind. He basically collected knowledge. Sometimes he brought his own interpretation to it. Sometimes he just documented it. He was obviously brilliant but a lot of what has been attributed to him, may simply be because he documented it.
And yet, the dumbest person in his home world.
Hi Animatronio!
La Maquina Magnifica!
When you think of his diversity of inventions it really has to be him.
That's to say nothing of his artistic achievement, which demonstrates another kind of (related) intelligence
And the fact that he’s a turtle and was capable doing allat.
He is THE Renaissance Man.
James clerk Maxwell, used straight mathematics to prove that the rings of Saturn are small rocks and was found correct a century later with satellites
Oliver Heaviside. He reshaped Maxwell’s equations into the form we still use today. That alone would put him in the top tier of minds, but the insane part is he had no formal education beyond the age of 16. No university training, no famous mentors, no academic pipeline. He taught himself advanced mathematics and physics from scratch. Einstein, Newton, Maxwell and others in the comments all had access to formal education and teachers. Heaviside did it alone, at least to best of my knowledge. Genius is impressive, but self-taught genius that permanently alters a field is on another level.
TBF Einstein was largely self taught, he had school and a personal tutor but the latter said that by the time Albert was 14 he couldn't teach him any more or follow his maths. That's not unusual for prodigies, so it's more about access to materials than the formal education, which is too easy for them as it's intended for normal people.
Ramanujan was another who was basically self-taught, who was living in quite poor conditions when he came to the attention of British professors.
Probably a lot of people who unfortunatly werent allowed to flourish, and probably a lot of people who were.
There are a lot of skilled, talented, and smart people with a lot of potential out there but they unfortunatly arent given the right circumstances, or are prevented in some way from reaching that public notoriety to be called "one of the -yadda yadda yadda" people in the world.
I have seen and known many a man who can sing better than some of the top tier musical artists, people who can paint or who have better concepts than people who's art is hung is galleries worth millions, people who's comedy, voice work, or acting is on par with or better than those that currently are well known in the respective industries, those that have minds capable of invention, creativity, improvisation, or otherwise but simply lack the money, the means, the location, the background, the connections, the publicity, maybe even the drive because life beats them down to the point of exaustion, or even just the time to be where they could/ should be.
The smartest guy I ever met intentionally blew his life up because it all felt too complicated. Last I heard he was a garbage man. Which, so you don't take me wrong, is an important job. I'd trade 100 bankers for one garbage man. But he liked that the job didn't require anything of him.
Newton
His cookies alone ranks him up there
It's not a cookie, it's a Fig Newton
Calculus, Laws of Motion, and figuring out that nature of light and color ... Any one of those would have cemented him as one of the greats.
Astonishing.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene
He first estimated the Earth's circumference around 240 B.C.. He did this by measuring the angle of the sun's rays in two different cities and using the distance between them to calculate the Earth's total circumference. His estimation was surprisingly accurate for its time. Absolute genius
He was insanely smart but certainly not the smartest in history. His calculation used existing geometric principles that many Greek mathematicians knew, it’s just that he put the effort into actually measuring (by hiring a professional walker) and calculating.
Pfft!! A circumference infers that the Earth is spherical 🙄
What are they going to expect us to believe next, that birds are real?
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie, known as Marie Curie. She was born in Warsaw, Poland and moved to Paris at the age of 24, where she studied in Sorbonne.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
She was not only very smart but also caring, beautiful human being.
A lot of people say Einstein but they don't realize he was not actually a real person...he was a THEORETICAL physicist. 🎶Ba-DA-Bump!
Albert was amazing, but his brother Frank was both a genius with electricity and a renowned bodybuilder.
Cannot believe I never heard this joke at anytime during my undergrad Astrophysics degree.
“They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.”
The true smartest person in history will always be unknown.
However Archimedes is a genius that other geniuses explicitly acknowledge as their superior. Galileo called him superhuman. And yeah you look at his accomplishments and how the hell did he figure out so much? He clearly just had a natural talent for science.
John Von Neumann is a contender.
The smartest recorded is probably Isaac Newton.
He wrote the laws of motion, invented calculus to calculate orbital trajectories, and discovered that white light was made of all of the colors of the rainbow. He did all of this without outside help.
Then he turned 26.
And after that, he turned 27.
As far as breadth of knowledge goes, I'm tempted to say Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Einstein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
For me, Gauss is #1.
But in terms of just raw talent and absolute "smartness" -- Ramanujan. He almost defies the Goulder quote of "how many died in sweatshops and cotton fields" -- that was basically him, and yet he made it out
Put simply, Ramanujan in the right setting would have been #1. Shame he died so early
Felt like I had to scroll too far for this one. That was one who just...could intuit esoteric mathematical truths out of nowhere. It's perhaps a narrow definition of "smart", but he clearly had an exceptional mind.
Isaac Newton straight up invented his own math in addition to discovering the laws of physics. This term is thrown around way too much but in this case I think it applies.
THE GOAT
AccomplishedAir9550
“They probably lived as a humble farmer” and “there wasn’t ONE smartest person” aside, here are some profoundly intelligent people from history (not people I agree with or who had the best ideas, just people I think were/are utter geniuses):
Edit: Let me reiterate that the post asked for the “smartest” person. Not the most well-known. Not the most correct. Anyone who inquires in good fairh about lesser known figures like Balog will get an interesting answer when I have time. Anyone who inquires in good faith about the inclusion of Chomsky (whose status for some reason appears to be controversial among YouTube-educated Redditors) will get an answer when I’m free. Anyone else who comes at me with an attitude and clearly isn’t highly educated in the works of these individuals will be blocked, because I genuinely don’t consider your thoughts or your personality disorder to be useful.
Bofadees, the Greek mathematician. He unfortunately died early of testicular cancer before most of his work could be truly appreciated but I bet most of you have never heard of Bofadees nuts.