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Einstein is the only modern physicist many people can name easily (some will also get Hawkins or Feynman), and his name has become synonymous with "smart". In a
by lkbm 5y ago
Einstein is the only modern physicist many people can name easily (some will also get Hawkins or Feynman), and his name has become synonymous with "smart". In a poll of the general public for "who's the smartest person?" he'd win due to name recognition. Even ten-year-olds know "Einstein = smart".
I suspect that if you asked the HN crowd for their guess at the smartest person, Mozart (thanks to Hofstadter) and von Neumann would come out on top (though I might just be biased towards whom I'd answer). Tao is a likely candidate for living person.
In terms of impact, Newton is truly stand-out, though I think when it comes to math, his most significant contribution was calculus, and Leibniz came up with that independently at the same time, and we now use his version instead of Newton.
- AprilArcus 5y agoAmused that your apocryphal "easily name"d scientist "Hawkins" appears to be a confused jumbling of popular science writers Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.
- lkbm 5y agoI meant Stephen Hawking. Hadn't thought about Dawkins at all. I was specifically thinking about physicists in that case, though I guess Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan fall under that umbrella.
- amelius 5y agoIf you'd ask about the smartest person, the HN crowd would probably name the richest person, which is Bezos or Musk (too lazy to look it up).
- lkbm 5y agoI was wondering if Bezos, Gates, or Musk would come out as number 1, at least for living people.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoI don't know anything about Terry Tao, but what makes you think he'll be placed above Einstein by the HN crowd?
- lkbm 5y agoI was saying Terry Tao specifically for living people. I also don't know a ton about him, but as someone in the math scene, he's the only modern-day mathematician I hear about with any regularity.
- zerosums 5y agoMy answer within the last few decades would be Alexander Grothendieck and I’d place him higher than Tao, Scholze and any other living (or dead) mathematician within that time frame. Few in the HN crowd understand the mathematics Grothendieck worked in and therefore cannot properly assess his contributions and intellect due to their unfamiliarity with his work. von Neumann had savant like intelligence, but Grothendieck was in an unmatched league of his own in terms of abstractions.