Smartest man who ever lived?

[Triumph36]

'Genetic ability' is a meaningless phrase. We don't know genes that well to claim anything like this, nor are genes so determinant as to express intelligence or potential intelligence perfectly.

As for the most intelligent person being unrecognized somewhere, that is highly doubtful. Human intelligence and the pursuit of knowledge is not like athletics, where the goals are defined; knowledge is limitless, and a lot of these 'smartest men' had it wrong on many subjects.

[CallMeIshmael]

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'Genetic ability' is a meaningless phrase. We don't know genes that well to claim anything like this, nor are genes so determinant as to express intelligence or potential intelligence perfectly.

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Genetic capability is most certainly a relavant term here.

I dont know much about this field, but, IIRC, grey matter volume is (among other phenotypic expressions) correlated with intelligence.

MANY, MANY people who are born, are born without the genetic capability of ever being the smartest person alive.

[CashFlo]

Solomon the King and Jesus Christ.

...of course, the latter was also God.

[David Sklansky]

"No, it's Sklansky's father. Remember, when Sklansky did his "smartest people ever" list, he specifically said "I am excluding my father from this list", which was a clear sign that Einstein et al were no match for him."

To become a fellow in the Society of Actuaries, you must pass ten tests. The first test is undergraduate college math through triple Integration. But while the subject matter is moderately simple the questions are hard. There are, or were, seventy of them on the three hour test and you needed to get about 38 right to pass.

In fact the questions were so hard that there was five prizes for the best five scores every year. One first prize and four other ones. Invariably this attracted the best undergraduate students in the country and the prizes (not eligible for graduate students) were always won by Harvard or MIT guys (who never went on to become actuaries). Keep in mind that the math knowledge did not involve graduate studies so the undergraduate geniuses who won the prize would have also beat almost all math Phds who were more knowledgeble but less brillaint.

Now the fact that every year there was only one first prize given out proves that at most only one person got a perfect score. More likely no one did. Not even the ivy league superstars who were taking the test only to win a significant cash prize.

When I was a junior in high school I easily passed the test. So what. At least five percent of Cal Tech students could have done the same. But to help prepare for the test. I took a copy of the previous year's test and asked my father to go over it with me. He was Forty years old and had stopped teaching math more than ten years before that. He was not aware of its difficulty and the prizes associated with it.

He proceeded to read the questions and with no preparation, tell out loud how he would answer them. An hour and a half later, he had answered them all. No mistakes. He burrowed through the test as easily as I would the math SAT. Sometimes he thought ten seconds before answering. Never longer. Ten years after his last math test. And this test was on all subjects from calculus through trigonometry and included many tricky word problems that would give run of the mill scientists fits. Plus the hour and a half it took him was including his verbal explanations to me.

His performance pretty much proved that he was smarter, mathematically, than any undergraduate math student of the previous twenty years. And while I believe it is reasonably likely that Gauss, Euler, and maybe even Feynman could have done as well, I'd lay a big price, if there was some way to prove it, that Einstein couldn't.

[gumpzilla]

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He proceeded to read the questions and with no preparation, tell out loud how he would answer them. An hour and a half later, he had answered them all.

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I don't view these as being the same thing for the purposes of evaluating performance on a timed test.

[Voltron87]

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Pretty sure it's David Sklansky.

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No, it's Sklansky's father. Remember, when Sklansky did his "smartest people ever" list, he specifically said "I am excluding my father from this list", which was a clear sign that Einstein et al were no match for him.

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well, this knocks him out of the running

[Triumph36]

That's all irrelevant. Genetics has nothing to do with it. If intelligence were strictly a material matter, we'd be sitting here comparing DNA and brains and neurons. We're not doing that, and I don't think it is possible to do that yet. I'd be fairly convinced that science has found out an ordinal scale with which to judge intelligence by viewing neuron activity or activity in certain parts of the brain vs. other parts, but I doubt they've come up with any common measure. It is therefore unquantifiable in the way we'd want it to be.

Therefore, while your question raises a good point, it is invalid because it is completely unanswerable, and I hardly think a good set of criteria with which to judge.

Furthermore I think the explanations provided in this thread make it incredibly likely that the 'smartest man' lived since the invention of written language.

[CallMeIshmael]

I was actually going to post another reply before you posted yours, because I have yet to give a great defintion of what we're looking at.

Here goes...

If EVERY person who ever lived, were reared in the EXACT same situation, then whomever was the 'smartest' person from these (somehow) independent experiments, would be the smartest person to ever live, genetically speaking.

Do you see what I mean, now?

Dont get me wrong, I agree that intelligence is a combination of both genetics and environment, but, what this subthread is discussing, is the question:

Is it likely that whomever would be the smartest under those conditions is known to us today?


Again, the answer is a pretty clear 'no', IMO.



BUT, fwiw, I do agree with you 100% that the smartest REALIZED intelligence, was 99.999999% certain to have lived since recorded time.

[goofball]

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And while I believe it is reasonably likely that Gauss, Euler, and maybe even Feynman could have done as well, I'd lay a big price, if there was some way to prove it, that Einstein couldn't.

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The list is likely longer than that, but whether or not Einstein could have done as well doesn't really change his status as one of the smartest human beings ever.

Also, if I could choose between being a genius at mathematics, and being a genius at theoretical physics (or experimental physics), it's not close. (While I wouldn't claim to be a genius at either, especially since I haven't done any real work at either in a long time, I certainly could have gotten a bachelors degree/started graduate school in mathematics, and I chose physics withotu hesitation)

[jgodin]

First time poster in this topic. Be nice.

goof, I don't think choosing whether to study mathematics or physics has anything to do with intelligence. I think it has more to do with personality than anything (I, too, probably could have do work in physics, but chose mathematics instead. I like their dental plan).

Another question posed to this forum. Do you believe that the mathematicians discussed in this forum

1) discover
or
2) create

the mathematics they've graced us with? If they do indeed discover (which to me is much less intelligent than creating, and I'm a math guy, so I can say that), could you really put mathematics ahead of folks like Michaelangelo or even the sliced-bread guy/girl? (props to my genius hotties out there)

Talk amongst yourselves.