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It could be I am way out of my depth here, but it seems to me someone like Von Neumann was certainly above Einstein. Von Neumann was an S-tier intellect, truly
by digging 3y ago
It could be I am way out of my depth here, but it seems to me someone like Von Neumann was certainly above Einstein. Von Neumann was an S-tier intellect, truly astonishing.
I don't know enough about Einstein to say whether or not he was also an S-tier, but I have often heard it said that someone would have figured out the stuff he is most famous for if he hadn't been there. Because others were working on similar math. And I've also read about Von Neumann just solving unsolvable things on whim, inventing new concepts whole cloth that weren't even the focus of his work, etc.
Nobody could say Einstein wasn't brilliant, but his being famous doesn't mean he was the most brilliant. For that matter, we should acknowledge that the smartest person to have ever lived might have died without ever touching a pencil, because we still use "being born in the right place" as a proxy for greatness. Should we ever meet the basics needs of everyone and to allow every mind to flourish, we might find our greats are less rare than we thought.
- mp05 3y agoThank you, this is precisely what sort of conversation I was trying to elicit. If anything, realizing that Einstein's intellect, while tremendous, is something we can wrap our heads around. He always seemed like a quality, if a bit unfocused, academic who managed to put himself in the right places at the right times and accomplished tremendous things as a result. A testament to the fact that one doesn't have to be a von Neumann level genius to affect science in earth shattering ways.