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

Human history neglects many bright minds, while showering praise on others, whose main achievement occasionally is just that — they managed to get their name attached to a discovery. On a less bitter note I would like to collectively nominate ancient Greece for the smartest culture that ever existed, and here is a quote from Bertrand Russell illustrating this point: > The guesses of the Pythagoreans in astronomy, of Anaximander and Empedocles in biological evolution, and of Democritus as to the atomic constitution of matter, provided the men of science in later times with hypotheses which, but for the philosophers, might never have entered their heads.