What is the smartest person in recorded history? Ramanujan? Von

>>8663329
terrence tao

>>8663329
imo Bernoulli.

>>8663329
>implying it wasn't J.W. Gibbs at all times.

newton

>>8663329
Euler

>>8663354
obv

Me, desu.

>>8663354
fpbp
>fourth post best post

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8663329
>I'm not talking about achievements
What good intelligence if not for achievements?

>>8663387
Many achievements are awarded posthumously if the person is avant-garde or marginalized (e.g. Cantor) so if we base intellect on achievements then the ladder is always changing.

Donald J. Trump

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8663354
>https://books.google.com.br/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA379&lpg=PA379&dq=newton+reread+book+many+times&source=bl&ots=rD9sTflKuS&sig=mgXmvRt6cR8YYZU9RMTDc8fYn4o&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjA2viUkITSAhWHW5AKHe7VDo4Q6AEISTAH#v=onepage&q=newton%20reread%20book%20many%20times&f=false
>At much the same time, Newton reread Descartes's Geometry. Sixteen years earlier, by his own account, he had struggled throught it alone, three or four pages at a time
As much as he was a genius, he indeed had his own struggles, and I don't think any of the people I mentioned at the OP would have needed to undergo that. I think he was a genius in a more conventional way, and his cognitive abilities just gave him a head start.

>>8663387
>What good intelligence if not for achievements?
Achievements are indeed way more important than intelligence, but I'm just curious to know who was the smartest person.

>>8663329

Sidis by far was the brainlet. Ramumujan was born to churn out conjectures like nothing. Neumann could do almost every STEM best in the world, and he could beat liberal arts nerds at their own game when he wanted to, like in Byzantine history.

>>8663452
>Sidis could read The New York Times at 18 months.
>By age 8, he had reportedly taught himself 8 languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) and invented another, which he called Vendergood.
>In early 1910, Sidis' mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies.
Von Neumann only learned 7 seven languages his entire life. Though he ended up mastering mathematics, I don't think he was able to teach at an university at 12.

>>8663329
Call me a newfag, but that flat Earth put a smile on my face. Thanks.

What are the odds that the most intelligent human ever was born before we started writing stuff down? In 100000* years of Homo sapiens I find it pretty unlikely that the definitive smartest human could ever be known. Newton is one of the smartest people in recorded history no doubt, and even he recognized that he was only standing on the shoulders of giants. A caveman (or cavewoman) doesn't have such an advantage, so the fact that he wasn't creating GUTs doesn't mean he wasn't an immensely smart individual.

*Behaviourally modern humans probsbly only occured about 50k years ago

>>8663810
That's why I said "the smartest person in recorded history"

>>8663797
newfag

>>8663422
so he was basically a retard neet that become a genius.

thats what true genius is, and newton still wins.

Michael Faraday

goethe

>>8663393
>Cantor
Didn't he come up with set theory, and was ridiculed at the time?

>>8663355
this

>>8664037
can someone give me a rundown

Ramanujan was probably not the smartest, he just had a ton of intuition (and arguably help from supernatural forces).

>>8664796
>arguably help from supernatural forces
>supernatural forces
>supernatural
>>>/x/

>>8664758
hehe

>>8663346
Underrated choice

>>8664758
Copypaste meme theory of bog relativity

Probably not some semi-autistic scientist or mathematician, but someone who acquired power and access.

I say this as a physicist

>>8663329
Kolmogorov

>>8665494
You really think a person who's that intelligent would make such pursuits? If anything I say, someone who's smart enough would realize power and success are pointless and would focus on whatever interests that person had.

>>8665536
That's a real smart observation there jimbo

>>8663329
Grigori Perelman

>>8665494
So Von Neumann, who helped develop the atomic bomb?

>>8663329
if we're talking about intelligence itself then this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-HXSHXUtFw

>>8665536
The pursuit for power and success is as pointless as everything else. Life is pointless.
Furthermore, that kind of pursuit is entirely emotional, so no matter how intelligent or how dumb a person is, if they are emotionally inclined to power, they will go after it.
The "people who are truly smart choose to live common lives pursuing their own interests rather than power" idea is a meme created by weak and unambicious people who think the rest of the world think like them.

Barnett

>>8663380
This. This guy is a fucking genius

>>8665841
>unambicious
nice

I've always subscribed to the idea that humans are smarter now than they were before. Now that doesn't mean that their potentials are the same. There's very good reason to believe that Bobby Fischer would be the chess player on the planet if he was born 20-30 years ago.

The answer to this question is probably the /sci/ memes in all honesty. Mochizuki, Terrence Tao, and Perelman would all be good picks.

While Mochizuki's interpretations on math might be proven to be mostly nonsense in the future, there's also a decent chance that we will see him as having the highest "power gap" between his peers of all time. Newton was almost beat to the punch with calculus and Einstein was maybe 10-15 years ahead of the curve. Mochizuki is way ahead of that. My best guess would honestly be 50+ years if his work is mostly valid, but like everyone else in the world, I can't understand pretty much any of it.

It's probably perelman or tao due to modern resources, but Mochizuki could be the GOAT when we're old.

>>8663329
Define intelligence.

>>8666396
Something your lacking because you are unable to look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary on your own.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence
>(1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations

>>8665536
INT vs WIS, anon.

>>8663329
me
>tfw high iq extraordinaire

>>8666396
Logic and creativity.
Only brainlets like you are unable to define it.

>>8663329
it's hard to tell since psychometry is a very young field and even now people question the validity of IQ tests to measure intelligence and the nature / definition of intelligence itself.

>>8664758
http://quickrundown.club/

>>8666382
GOAT? Nigga please...

Plenty of people have had ideas their contemporaries did not understand. Evariste Galois is the first example that comes to mind. He was rejected and/or ignored by both Cauchy, Fourier AND Poisson, and died without recognition for essentially inventing modern abstract algebra.

But there are many, MANY more. This Mochizuki guy might be very smart, but unlike so many geniuses that struggled for recognition through what must have looked like a failed life, he is already an established academic with fanboys. You might have a skewed view of reality here.

As for GOAT...

Knuth, Gauss, Riemann, Euler, Arkimedes, Euclid, da Vinci, Turing, Einstein, Newton, Liebniz, Abel, Tesla, Erdös, Noether, Lie, Gödel, Galois, Fermat, Klein, Ramanujan, von Neumann, Pascal... I could go on and on... There are so many strong candidates!

You seem to be forgetting what Isaac Newton stated as:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

My friend Steven

>>8665558
I remember him, the smartest bar bouncer of all times.

"Abstract: Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific
model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality
of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract
currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the
information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained)
description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying
mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical
to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic
Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic.
Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes
reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language
characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and selfexecution
(reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of
infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic
operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive
syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines
itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational
constraint."

http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8664621
indeed he did, and lets not forget about Boltzmann! He discerned a profound thermodynamical constant and was mocked and ridiculed all the way to suicide.... and after that everyone realized he was actually correct the whole time

Me, as I'm the only person that objectively exists.

St Thomas Aquinas

File: 1486681561597.jpg (34KB, 559x476px) Image search: [Google]

34KB, 559x476px

>>8664758

File: bog_rundown.jpg (2MB, 2424x2817px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 2424x2817px

>>8664758

>>8668385
fucking what?

>>8665558
>>8668171

> Claims to be the smartest person in the world.

> Believes in a God, in this millenium.

> Thinks the world would be better if we were all cynically controlled assholes, and so has no concept of whether, and if so why, living itself is meaningful. Seems totally unable to grasp a meta view of "progress".

That's a total fail. This guy clearly isn't very smart. And if he has a high IQ score, that's a testament to the weaknesses of IQ tests today.

>>8669469

I understand points 1 and 3, but I don't understand the trend on /sci/ to dog on people who believe in God. There are many successful, educated, and intelligent scientists and mathematicians (alive in this millennium) who are also devout believers.

>>8663329
Newton obviously. To develop calculus and physics by himself required a top grade autism.
>inb4 Leibniz
They both develop calculus independently.

But Einstein was smart as fuck too. He did the same shit Newton did to mechanics, but with a different kind of space time.
>Von Newmann
He's just a fucking meme. Smart but not that smart if you understand what I mean

>>8669492
It's mostly because atheism is cool boi, all of my favourite scientist like Dawkins are atheists, that means it's cool.

>>8669518

I think if von Neumann was as autistic as Newton, then he could have done wonders in a small number of fields. Instead, he chose to be really, really good in a lot of fields and a huge expert in some others, but never Newton-tier in a single one.

>Ramanujan

hahah..hahahahahah..hahahhHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>>8663329
Archimedes

>>8663329
Still think on Nicola tesla or da Vinci.

>>8669492
Believing in some God is an emotional thing. We like to think we have some guide, friend, closeness, meaning, master, leader of the herd... Plus it plays into our ego to think we are part of something greater. And of course there is the community aspect of serving a common cause with others. You see this in wars too, it can be very bonding.

>>8669492
>>8669649
As for actually believing in that stuff in 2017...

First of all, let's consider specific religions, such as christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism... With their holy books and prophets.

Now, we live in a world where we are familiar with several such concurrent religions. Religion A might say you go to hell if you practice religion B, and vice versa. How do we know which religion is correct? The answer is: We don't. It's all down to blind faith, and this faith is usually whatever you happened to be raised with. Logically, the correct faith could be any of the common narratives, or something else entirely. You can make your own religion because you feel like it, and maybe that is the ultimate truth! There is just no holding ground for choosing one faith over another.

Also, these mainstream religions are proven wrong, and have been for centuries. We know now that "heaven" is not some place full of angels and dead people, because we can go there and have a look. We also know the earth isn't flat, it clearly wasn't made in 7 days, and so on. We have extensive historical documentation of holy scriptures being destroyed, selected or changed for political reasons. We know that the various prophets and disciples have contradicting stories about the same events, even within the same religion. We understand that Noa's ark is infeasible, that humans evolved from primates (not Adam and Eve, or Ask and Embla), we know thunder is not caused by a guy wielding a hammer... I could go on... In short, we know the traditional tales are bullshit. Even the church has said for a long time that the bible is just symbolism. But then there is no reason to take any of those stories at face value.

>>8669492
>>8669651

As for a more abstract kind of supernatural "holy spirit" (one that would be interested in our much desired "purpose"), that is also an outdated concept.

We accept that there are things we don't yet understand, but we have changed our dominant mindset to being interested in figuring them out, not just believing in something "beyond us". That's a really important thing. With this mindset, we have challenged miracle workers, magicians, prophets, psychics etc. to do something inexplicable for centuries. Scientists would be very interested if they could. Sure, we have discovered loads of stuff that would seem like magic to people 2000 years ago, and we understand how they could be dumbstruck by a spark, hallucinations, plagues, con artists or simple probable coincidences (including pareidolia). But there are no actual magicians and miracle workers. Close examinations for an extended period of time have dismissed "supernatural influence" as a common misunderstanding.

>>8669492
>>8669653

Also, the whole idea of a spirit to guide us is very egocentric, and rather silly. It goes with the idea that humans are somehow totally disctinct from (other) animals; that the sun, stars and entire universe revolves around us. This is seen today to be a misconception. We are just the top animals on earth, according to our own concept of being on top (which is not for example "biggest", "quickest", "longest living" or "most populous"). Why do we assume we have some special role that is so important that a whole set of supernaturals would exist just to cater to us? Why would superbeings care so much about the homo sapiens on Tellus? It makes no sense.

And even if we were the center of the universe, why would an allmighty being need to create imperfect humans and spend so much time meddling in the minute affairs of their lifes? It's just silly. Why do we even assume an allmighty being would think in the same sort of way that we do? Anger, love, blame, worhsip, happiness, commands, sadness, sin... These are human emotions. Our instincts, stumbled upon by evolution, and quite random and meaningless in view of the entire universe. They just mean a lot _to_us_. The classical scriptures, as well as modern artists, go so far as to decribe "God" as some bearded old man who likes to have a chat with us. This speaks volumes about the psychology behind religious faith. But believing that this makes sense is just ridiculous.

>>8669492
>>8669654

So what are we left with, if we still insist on believing in some god? Well, you can try to believe in some universal "force", far removed from humans, who put this all together. But if you imply that this entity has some sort of consciousness, it just adds unfounded complexity to what we are observing, without explaining anything: Who created god then? And why? And if it was random, or "just happened", then what's to say the same is not true for humans, and the universe itself?
The major religions are obvious figments of human psychology. Whatever concept of "god" there might be (and granted: this is a hard thing to define, let alone disprove), it clearly is not observable as a conscious being, and all measurements, probability and reason tells us it has no bearing on our day to day lives (beyond science, aka "laws of nature"). So we might as well live as atheists.

It seems much more intelligent to directly study human well-being, nature, science, mathematics etc., than to worship some random mysticism. Being an atheist doesn't mean you can't marvel in awe at the world around you, and care about human happiness. To the contrary: This awe and caring sparked the creation of religions. It resides within human nature in the first place.

Atheists might be robbed of a certain feeling of grandure that Bach, Newton and so on benifited from. But I for one would rather live in the real world than worship a random book, and I couldn't fool myself into becoming religious even if I wanted to (short of getting some mental illness involving genuine psychosis). On the bright side, I like to think well founded atheism makes me more reflected and reflecting. I am able to constantly reevaluate what I think, see relativism (different viewpoints), and I would have a hard time supporting something like a holy war.

>>8663329
Imhotep desu

File: Creación_de_Adán_(Miguel_Ángel).jpg (685KB, 1707x775px) Image search: [Google]

685KB, 1707x775px

>>8669492
>>8669522

PS:

I am guessing you, religious anon, live in USA. Your insistance on religious faith over there goes well with the president worshiping and flag worshiping that you rely on to keep your too-big, dubious history country so unified and stable. I think it's good for both the world and you guys that you got a president now that is so obviously human.

Hopefully you will break up into nation states after a while. That would relax some of your authority worship, and open the gates for more interesting development. Hopefully you would feel a collective responsibility for the environment, but with less inclinement to invade/bomb other nations and stuff like that.

>>8663329
nikola tesla was by far the smartest person ever, he was a god

File: ferris_bueller_quotes_teacher1.jpg (18KB, 500x258px) Image search: [Google]

18KB, 500x258px

Euler, Euler, Euler?

File: 1481303519647.gif (190KB, 300x300px) Image search: [Google]

190KB, 300x300px

>>8665994

File: drooling-1.jpg (296KB, 960x1280px) Image search: [Google]

296KB, 960x1280px

Leonard Euler
Bernoulli
Newton
Hilbert
Pythagoras
George Kant
Kurt Godel
Stephen Hawking
Elon Musk

>>8669659

That was a lot of words to say that atheists can be good people.

I don't disagree. I simply don't see how you can't simultaneously be intelligent and believe in God at once. Again, I state that many modern people who clearly have to be at least above average in intelligence to do the work that they do are very religious.

>>8670068
>Pythagoras
>Kant
>Hawking
>Musk

meme list

>>8663329
>John Von Neumann
>a brainlet when compared to a decent indian and a fake nobody
>a brainlet when compared to anyone
you need to see how contemporary mathematicians (contemporary to him) speak about his abilities. he's inhuman.

>>8670068
fuck off to reddit

File: feynman.jpg (15KB, 200x258px) Image search: [Google]

15KB, 200x258px

>>8669919

>says he's a mathematician
>calls euler "you-ler" and not "oiler"

>>8663329
The Ancient Indians knew discovered several mathematical equations about a 1000 years before modern maths.

>>8670456
>Kant
>meme

>>8663329
Darwin

/thread

>>8670304
You seem to have missed the point. "Atheists can't be good people" would be a completely daft claim, and not something I would bother responding so much to.

What I was explaining was that it makes no sense to believe in religion, at least not today. Certainly not any of the most common religions, which have been proven both inconsistent and false long ago, many times over.

And that if someone smart is religious in the typical sense, that is an artifact of their emotional desires and habits, definitely not their intelligence.

However, if you are more concerned about what some authority figure seems to think, than examining arguments to gain some sort of understanding, I don't suppose logical reasoning is much use for you in this debate.

>>8669919
crunge

>>8670580
It's actually pronounced "You-ler" but back in the 18th century, there was a running meme in Basel where they deliberately started pronouncing "Eu" as "Oi" which eventually stuck.

Learn your history, faggot.

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8664758
Yes, refer to:

reddit.com/r/The_Bogdanoff/

Steve Jobs probably.

>>8663346
Gibbs is probably one of the most underrated scientists of all time. In a single stroke, he collected, unified, and advanced thermodynamics to near completeness.

>>8665841
Stop being a beta seeking for approval.

File: 149188-004-E9F3D5B9.jpg (18KB, 306x450px) Image search: [Google]

18KB, 306x450px

>>8663329
>What is the smartest person in recorded history?
Plato

ctrl F
no siddhartha

sci is pleb board i just can't take seriously anymore

so long faggots

>>8663396
This is the correct answer

>>8675192
>got absolutely btfo by diogenes
'no'

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8665558
definitely

>>8663329
Jacob Barnett

>>8663329
>What
Not you obviously.

>>8663329
Define: Smart (Capacity to learn|intelligence|wisdom)

Answer that satisfies the criteria:
Western society: Socrates
Eastern society: Lao Tzu

ludwig von mises

Heidegger

>Mathematics
Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Riemann, Lagrange, Fourier, Bernoulli, Dirichlet, Cantor, Hilbert

>Philosophy
Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger

>Physical Sciences
Darwin, Dalton, Newton, Heisenberg

>Literature
Goethe, Cervantes, Shakespeare

File: 1403096681705.jpg (3MB, 900x4100px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 900x4100px

>>8669649
>>8669651
>>8669653
>>8669654
>>8669659
basic bitch atheist talking points

>>8676151
>literature
Add Lem. He was known for his genius level intelligence.

>>8663380
only right answer

File: 1485396739049.jpg (47KB, 500x500px) Image search: [Google]

47KB, 500x500px

Inteligence isn't knowledge, it's something that can be positively and negatively influenced by it. The will and the reasoning behind questioning small or big things in life is what made made many of there people so reasoned behind their discoveries. And if you happen to discover something fundemental breaking, you will be perceived to be a 'smart' man. Just a man. With it's sense of logic finetuned on a specific field of humanly defined logic. But in the end, doesn't know everything about it either until it gets a place to be permanentized, thus that location will be bound to the information instead of everything in the brain. It's alot easier with human motives to just know where the things are written instead of knowing what that exactly is.
TD;DR: just an anon flopping out some of the nonsensical thought dumps.

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8663355
Definitely Euler. Anyone saying otherwise is being contrarian

>>8677438
Yooler, you say? I don't know, Gaub might be smarter.

>>8663355
Ferris Beuler is euler 2.0

>>8676151
Out of all of them, who is the smartest? Don't even say something like "but each of them was good in their respective areas." Obviously there were some of them who were better at their areas than others were good at their areas.

>>8676154
Brute american ooga booga. I guess you got me.

>>8669585
> Not realising buoyancy until in bath
I like that story

Alexander the Great

>>8678005
"Noli turbare circulos meos" (Don't disturb my circles)
- Last words of Archimedes of Syracuse before being killed by a Roman soldier.

>>8678010
Alexander the Most-Overrated-Conqueror-In-Western-History

>>8678016
Being entertained by circles to the point of endangering your life.
Also fucking Romans man

>>8678018
>Alexander is overrated meme
Please off yourself, Alexander accomplished more on the way out of his mother's womb than you ever will.

>"The Great" is a misogynistic term, fuck Alexander for being a fucking white male
This is literally the narrative that began the Alexander mudslinging meme

probably someone i have never heard about.

>>8664042
Couldn't do calculus basically fucked around until he realized a pattern

>>8678254
> "The Great" is a misogynistic term
no it isn't lol.
the revisionist history movement is older than 3rd wave feminism
> Alexander accomplished more on the way out of his mother's womb than you ever will.
nor you. But neither of us call ourselves the great right?
Pompey was called the great too, but at least he isn't after getting crushed by Caesar's inferior force

3 better generals off the top of my head
Hannibal
Julius Caesar
Gengis Khan

File: 1487051908395.png (159KB, 306x480px) Image search: [Google]

159KB, 306x480px

>>8664758
>not already ODing on bog pills
>not already making that call
>not already bowing to the bogdanofs

>>8678613

>Julius Caesar


babbys first general


Cato the Younger would like a word with u

Not even kidding, probably Mochizuki. His thinking is so advanced it wouldn't surprise me if he's found some sort of basic, fundamental property of math that's so far eluded everyone, to the point that he may have, as absurd as it sounds, have "solved" math. I've heard rumors that every single one of the remaining millennium prize puzzles will be unraveled thanks to his work.

>>8678758
Didn't Cato and Scipio get beaten by Caesar's armies?

heh. I guess I was more referring to the Battle of Pharsalus, but reading further into it Caesar won by Pompey's ineptness, not the other way around.

Sooo what'd Cato have to say?
And are you going by orator or generalship skills now?

>>8663355
yep it's euler no question

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8678613
>the revisionist history movement is older than 3rd wave feminism
And it's responsible for 99% of the Alexander mudslinging you run into on the internet and talking to college-aged "intellectuals".

>3 better generals off the top of my head
>Hannibal
>Julius Caesar
>Gengis Khan
Prove it. Oh wait, you can't, because Alexander was undefeated, literally could not have done better in his short time. And remind me, did OP ask "Who is the greatest general of all time"? No?

>>8663354
>Discovers questions that must have an answer
>Makes method of answering questions using nothing but massive penis

Top tier genius

>>8677515
>Boyler

Galois.
Also the cutest

File: ludwig-von-mises-6.jpg (3MB, 3007x2337px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 3007x2337px

MISES

>>8678759
I don't mean to take away from this guy, I'm sure he's smart. He might even be an important historical figure in the development of mathematics.

But you can't really compare him to giants like Euler, Gauss, Einstein and da Vinci. At least not yet. They've been proven to have an astounding ability to master and revolutionize whatever they put their mind to. And only centuries later can we truly appreciate how far they saw.

Mochizuki might have discovered something amazing, but we don't even know yet. Is it on the level of what Galois did?

Does Mochizuki compare to someone who's work lay a foundation we have only started to really build on over time, like Sophus Lie, or someone who is (so far) only famous for single a single (albeit great) theorem, like Andrew Wiles?

Could Mochizuki do pretty much anything, like da Vinci or Archimedes, or is he fine tuned to just maths?

For all we know, we might be witnessing a schizophrenic breakdown, of the kind John Nash is said to have had. Maybe that explains why Mochizuki's papers are so incomprehensible.

We just don't know yet, and we quite possibly won't know for a long time.

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8680960
b. effect

>>8678759
>>8680951

In any case, there have been many ridiculously smart people throughout history. Most of which have so far been omitted in this thread. I could mention:

> Max Planck
Who pretty much invented quantum physics.

> Werner Heisenberg
Inventor of the uncertainty principle and master pioneer of thought experiment.

> Linus Pauling
Renegade chemistry giant.

> Niels Henrik Abel
Huge influence on maths, from just 6 years of working in sickness and poverty before he died.

> Johann Sebastian Bach (!!!)
Probably the greatest composer of all time, so prolific that he has his works have their own numbering system, and capable of improvising astounding fugues with 6 concurrent voices.

> George Cziffra
Through a life of poverty, imprisonment, alcoholism and tragedy he still played piano, improvised and arranged at an inhuman level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSBXbX5pQ3g

> René Descartes
Inventor of coordinates, analytical geometry and huge figure in philosophy.

> Galileo Galiei
Who founded much of modern science, and made huge advances in astronomy and physics.

> Gautama Buddha
Invented Buddhism 500 BC, and a huge influence on philosophy to this day.

Hilbert, Hardy, Russel, Curie, Dirac, Kepler, Shakespeare, Poe, Nobokov, Verne, Orwell, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, al-Kwarizmi, Diophantus, Brahmagupta (inventor of 0)...

There are SO MANY great minds that could be mentioned!

The competition is very, very tough. So when I suggest "Euler", that is saying a lot.

You seem to be taking this too lightly, dismissing all these people in a flash with "Yeah, but Mochizuki sounds like he's really smart, he must be the greatest of all time".

That's a BOLD claim...

Leonardo da Vinci

File: 1454786540290.jpg (20KB, 500x313px) Image search: [Google]

20KB, 500x313px

>>8681013
>Max Planck
>Who pretty much invented quantum physics.

Not debating that he was great, and his discoveries may have led to quantum physics but he didn't contribute much to the theory himself

>>8663331
Which one?

Either Darwin or Turing.

Jesus Christ

>>8681600
You mean the biblical character from who we have not one single text or artifact, who is described inconsistently and only after he is supposed to have died, who resembles the mythical figures of other religions, who may or may not have lived and who may or may not have been a single person if he/they lived?

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8677516
Nietzsche

>>8681535
Wikipedia goes to some length to say you are wrong, and adds that he was gifted in music as well:

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

With so many physicists on this list, Maxwell should be on it too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell

>>8663329
Tesla, Da Vinci, there have been a lot of insanely great minds. It'd be really hard to know who was really the smartest in recorded history.

Also, we'd have to be almost as or just as smart as that person to truly recognise just how smart they were, perhaps.

For example we only know Einstein was smart because after a bit of effort we can understand some or a good part of what he's saying and recognise it as intelligent ourselves.

A being like God could disguise Himself say something like 'Grass is beans and life are cat eye lids the answer is nine.' And we would think he was retarded when for real he was telling us something insanely beyond our understanding.

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8682034
Yes jesus christ, and his dad, god. Amen brother. Rest easy.

>>8681600
>>8682034
Guys, God doesn't count. The question was who was the smartest 'person'. You can't have God in the equation it's like a 4 year old fighting in the MMA if we're including God in our quest to find the smartest person in history.

>>8663329
>What is

Ed Witten

>>8663331
which one?

>>8663331
One Witch

eoht.info

you're welcome

>>8663810
>even he recognized that he was only standing on the shoulders of giants
You have to read the subtext.

Goethe

>>8682862
*his dad, Joseph.

Sincerely,
God

>>8683886
Why do some people insist Goethe was so extremely smart? I don't get it.

Is this some religious thing, because he wrote about hell, heaven and whatnot?

>>8683968
>Why do some people insist Goethe was so extremely smart? I don't get it.
http://www.eoht.info/page/Johann+Goethe

>>8663329
Gaben Newell.
He never learned to count past 3 yet somehow generated billions of other digits.

>>8683968
because he didn't just write YA garbage, he was really a jack of all trades in sciences; he wrote books on color theory and chemistry, and was an influence to many geniuses

Euler

>>8683968
it's because he did a shitload of things.

>>8684097
I had an EE prof in Germany who build whole lectures around Goethe's Faust.Many here see him as the greatest German ever lived.

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8663787
>giving a shit about childhood accomplishments

>>8663787
From what I read on Wikipedia, Sidis had family with a tendency to over-exaggerate his accomplishments. Also, it seems all his test results and accomplishments have been lost to history.

File: 6.png (17KB, 306x297px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 306x297px

>>8665558
>>8666644
>>8666911
>>8668171
>>8683783
>>8663329

Touting an extremely high IQ first and foremost is usually a dead giveaway of unsubstantiated claims. Personally I've never scored below 142, and I think most people with similar experience from IQ tests must agree that in situations like that, the tests become extremely unreliable.

IQ is kind of like BMI in some regards: Useful for a quick sorting of pretty average people, but with many shortcomings if you want to evaluate atypical individuals accurately.

For one, IQ doesn't measure everything. Einstein might have had an IQ of 150 and still be a much greater genius than someone in Mensa who tests 160. IQ-tests measure some standard things, like the ability to recognize patterns of movement from watching a few "screenshots", or the ability to find a matematical expression to match a certain sequence. I'm not saying these aren't important things for success in science, because they are. But ingenuity, deep understanding, a wide frame of reference, consideration of things relative to oneanother, ability to assume new ways of thinking, ability to extract a lot of information from little input, independence from others, and things like that are very hard to measure in a standarized test. If you move up to the tests designed for very high IQs, they are mostly about memory games, knowing what a Riemann sphere is, or things like that. Or they simply scale up the normal tests, wanting you to do the same, only quicker and with more variables. These are things you can train for, and even if you are naturally gifted to do this, that doesn't necessarily translate into being the next Einstein. IQ tests give quite a fair idea, differantiating between an IQ of 80 and one of 120. But they have their shortcomings.

File: quote-instead-of-being-a-student-of-a-given-field-i-would-like-you-to-be-the-field-jacob-barnett-76-88-42.jpg (46KB, 850x400px) Image search: [Google]

46KB, 850x400px

This guy.

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8665536
That's why I respect accomplished artists

File: bill-nye.jpg (198KB, 610x442px) Image search: [Google]

198KB, 610x442px

>>8663329
None of the brainlets suggested in this thread even compare to him.

File: iq curve.jpg (127KB, 871x1111px) Image search: [Google]

127KB, 871x1111px

>>8687412

Secondly, people throw around numbers like "IQ of 180" with no specification of which IQ measure they are talking about. There are different types of IQ tests. The most common ones are Wechsler for clinical testing, and also Stanford-Binet for the type of IQ tests you see online. Different tests may produce what they simply call an IQ score, even though they measure different things.

Also, they norm the results after a bell curve (Gauss curve) with the average test result being assigned the expected IQ value of 100. The standard deviation of the curve however, has not been universally agreed on, especially in the past. Mensa and most others today like to use 15 (SD-15), but some tests use 24 (SD-24). That means a guy with an IQ of 145 (SD-15) would have an IQ of 172 if the exact same test used SD-24.

Furthermore, what's to say intelligence actually follows a normal (Gauss curve) distribution? They assume results scale in some sense, but that's entirely hypothetical. What if this is mostly a case of "getting it" or "not getting it" on the normal tests? There might be a noticable difference between people scoring 90 or 110, but the difference between 140 and 160 could be more arbitrary and less relevant.

According to the normal distribution they use (with SD-15), the amount of people scoring 250 or more should be 1 in about 1023. With only about 1011 people ever having lived, a person with an IQ of 250 (as is claimed for Sidis) should by definition not exist, no matter how smart he was. Even an IQ of 200 (defined as 1 in about 1011) should expectedly only have belonged to one person since the first animal considered human set foot on earth. But again, there is no measuring everyone, especially considering that modern humans probaby score better than cavemen (average IQ rises every year). There are just so many uncertainties here. People who claim to have IQs like that rely (at best) on a frail idea of normal curves and how correct answers scale.

>>8687690

4chan fucks up unicode superscripts, sorry. That should read:

> According to the normal distribution they use (with SD-15), the amount of people scoring 250 or more should be 1 in about 10^23. With only about 10^11 people ever having lived, a person with an IQ of 250 (as is claimed for Sidis) should by definition not exist, no matter how smart he was. Even an IQ of 200 (defined as 1 in about 10^11) should expectedly only have belonged to one person since the first animal considered human set foot on earth.

File: high-iq-societies-8-728.jpg (102KB, 728x546px) Image search: [Google]

102KB, 728x546px

>>8687690

You can deduce a lot of uncertainty here just from common sense too:

The most popular tests (Wechsler) max out at 160. So even if you get a perfect score, you will be told your IQ is 160.

And while a score of 100 might be somewhat reliable, since it signifies an average ratio of correct answers from many tries on similar questions, a perfect score is more unreliable. You might mess up the most difficult question even though you would get most of them right if they were all that difficult. For that matter, a simple "typo" type error can easily set you back 7 IQ points from what would otherwise be a perfect score. 20 of 40 correct answers can happen in a lot of different ways, and some guesswork/chance is part of the picture. 40 of 40 can only happen in one way, and if you are unlucky with just one misreading, it ruins everything instantly.

Personally, whenever I've taken these tests, I've spent a lot of time considering if this is a good test, what they are measuring, if they've made any false assumptions, if there can be more than one valid answer, if I can generalize this pattern into some system and what its properties would be, and so on. On several occasions I've contacted Mensa or other test authors and told them about errors or multiple valid answers in their test, and gotten thanks from them afterwards. I like to think this is a sign of intelligence, but it does not show up in my IQ results. To the contrary, it makes me dwell on questions and costs me time, which often translates to missed questions at the end of the test.

Not to mention another thing: It's hard to figure out what you should ask someone who is smarter than you, since you're supposed to be the one with the correct answers. Plenty of people can challenge "your average bloke". But who or how many can intelligently challenge the particularly gifted? There's little quality control of those challenges.

>>8676154
Not gonna lie, if the person who made that list actually read all those books and didn't just hear of them/wasn't making some joke, it's a pretty badass and great list.

File: genius-always-finds-itself-a-century-too-early-quote-1.jpg (34KB, 600x700px) Image search: [Google]

34KB, 600x700px

>>8687825

Trying to summarize a bit:

- IQ-tests are limited in what they measure.

- Various IQ-tests and their scales differ greatly.

- Not everyone is tested, so how rare (and thus how high) an IQ is, is based on loose assumptions.

- Very high IQs might be rather worthless, both because the main thing about these tests could be whether or not you "get it", and because very high IQs depend more on chance and luck than low IQs.

- The IQ tests for very smart people are something you can train for, and it's hard to verify the merit of those tests.

I've used a lot of words to say this, but in short:

Super high IQ scores are very unreliable, and they don't tell the full story.

>>8687353
>>8663787
>>8685691
>>8663452
>>8663329

I think stories like that of Sidis, or this bouncer guy, are rather sad actually.

I mean, these guys were probably gifted in some regard, and might have contributed something. But for one reason or another their life goes to shit, and they spend the rest of their lives clinging to their old claim to fame: Some IQ test result they once got, and how impressed people were when they were kids.

Personally, I think the bouncer guy seems above average, but not that smart. And he seems to have turned his failed success into a sort of bitterness that makes him an arrogant asshole.

This Sidis guy? I honestely don't know.

It is well known that Galois struggled hard, even failing entry at the Ecole Polytechnique twice. But he at least managed to produce a paper, which we have recognized after his death was pure genius.

Could Sidis have done such a thing? Maybe? But he is now remembered for exaggerated, silly claims of an "IQ of 250", and looks almost like a con artist. I think that's really sad actually. We will never know if he could have delivered something. Spending years locked up in a sanitarium and stuff like that is no easy deal.

>>8687893
Picture of William James Sidis, for my previous post.

>>8663329
njwildberger

File: sidis.jpg (87KB, 1917x1369px) Image search: [Google]

87KB, 1917x1369px

>>8687901
Fucking hell...

Here, a picture of William James Sidis.

File: Lewis Carroll Kissing Alice.jpg (170KB, 500x698px) Image search: [Google]

170KB, 500x698px

>>8687903
>>8687893

It seems like apart from the occasional torture and killing of heretics, people were in some sense freer in the days of da Vinci or Euler. Nowadays we are surrounded by a dense population of other people, a government trying to control every detail of our lives down to what we see on the internet, and distractions everywhere.

If Lewis Carroll were alive today, he would probably be locked up over child porn and sexual abuse charges, his life spirit withering away in some cell. Aristotle, Plato and Socrates certainly would be locked up in hard prisons with long sentences, as they were active pederasts. We would hear nothing from them.

Euler or da Vinci wouldn't be free to ponder the mysteries of life in their own time. They would be surrounded by a roar of information, demands for productivity and distractions everywhere, and even getting up to speed in one subject would entail reading huge amounts. Da Vinci would also certainly be in jail. He would for instance perform quick autopsies on the spot to learn about the human body. Court judges and lynching journalists are complete idiots. They wouldn't understand something like that.

Life for smart people in modern society is tough, and we should give some more thought to how were are limiting people, and what wonderful things we might be loosing as a consequence.

Imagine if someone arrested Euler and deleted his collective works, just because he had seen pictures of nude teens on the internet. Stuff like that happens today, for real. It's horrible.

>>8687825

> Imagines the only member of the "Giga society" sitting around having lunch, wishing everyone on earth was forced through extensive testing so he would have a couple more people to eat lunch with.

Alternatively:

- The 20 members of the giga society mingling at a party, trying to forget what the world population is.

kek

>>8668466
Quick rundown on them:
> Rothschilds bow to Bogdanoffs
> In contact with aliens
> Possess psychic-like abilities
> Control france with an iron but fair fist
> Own castles & banks globally
> Direct descendants of the ancient royal blood line
> Will bankroll the first cities on Mars (Bogdangrad will be be the first city)
> Own 99% of DNA editing research facilities on Earth
> First designer babies will in all likelihood be Bogdanoff babies
> both brothers said to have 215+ IQ, such intelligence on Earth has only existed deep in Tibetan monasteries & Area 51
> Ancient Indian scriptures tell of two angels who will descend upon Earth and will bring an era of enlightenment and unprecedented technological progress with them
> They own Nanobot R&D labs around the world
> You likely have Bogdabots inside you right now
> The Bogdanoffs are in regular communication with the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, forwarding the word of God to the Orthodox Church. Who do you think set up the meeting between the pope & the Orthodox high command (First meeting between the two organisations in over 1000 years) and arranged the Orthodox leader’s first trip to Antarctica in history literally a few days later to the Bogdanoff bunker in Wilkes land?
> They learned fluent French in under a week
> Nation states entrust their gold reserves with the twins. There’s no gold in Ft. Knox, only Ft. Bogdanoff
> The twins are about 7 decades old, from the space-time reference point of the base human currently accepted by our society
-In reality, they are timeless beings existing in all points of time and space from the big bang to the end of the universe. We don’t know their ultimate plans yet. We hope they’re benevolent beings.

>>8687825
>look up the giga society
>http://gigasociety.com/
>literally a geocities-tier website

For fuck's sakes...

>>8688056
To be fair, a lone genius might not have time for a lot of webdesign...

>>8663354
Which one?

>>8663331
Which one?

>>8687597
retard meme

>>8684083
ebin meem

>>8669593
>How to spot reddit, the post.

How the fuck have none of you tards mentioned Claude Shannon yet? Makes everyone that has been listed look borderline retarded.

>>8664758
Which one?

Paul Erdos

>>8669536
Newton smashed hella subjects including real life