The Smartest Person Who Ever Lived (2015)

Article: "Sadly, despite his fame, Isaac Newton led a very lonely life."

Seems like the author projecting his own limited standards. Newton could have been extremely content in his work, in his own space.

Article: "his reclusive and anti-social nature strongly suggest that he was autistic"

It doesn't suggest that at all. This is another huge leap by the author. Newton was more likely an introvert. He was certainly very passionate about his work and the many adventures of the mind.

The points above don't detract from the article (Newton is among the easier picks, easy article to write) but the sloppy thinking by the author does irk quite a bit.

For the given title, it's surprising that no non-Europeans are mentioned or non-STEM for that matter. Some other contenders could be:

1. Su Song

2. Plato

3. Gautama

4. Zhang Heng

5. Bhaskara(I/II)

6. Al Biruni

7. Da Vinci

8. Al Khwarizmi

In my opinion, Einstein's theories were much more profound and revolutionary than Newton's ideas. Also, Einstein seems to be much more mentally stable and "normal". The fact that calculus was independently invented by two scientists simultaneously just confirms that it was a natural progression of the mathematical ideas published just a few years earlier.

Besides Newton, my other contender is von Neumann.

He also helped created so many fields and branches of knowledge.

Einstein is actually overrated in my opinion, compared to Newton and von Neumann.

Hm. Leonardo da Vinci would also be a good contender.

"The more I study Isaac Newton, the more fascinating he becomes."

Leibniz would also be a good contender:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/10/my-hero-leibni...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-understand-the-univers...

"Gottfried Leibniz, active in the 17th and 18th centuries, who along with Isaac Newton invented calculus. Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside."

----

"This interconnection (or accommodation) of all created things to each other,brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others,and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.

Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitudeof simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, . . .

And this is the way of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible, that is,it is the way of obtaining as much perfection as possible.

—G. W. Leibniz, The Monadology, 56-58, 1714

I once read once a quote about Leibniz, that roughly went like: When Newton was buried, he was buried like a king. When Leibniz was buried, only his servant was present. But the long Leibniz is dead, the longer his shadow becomes.

I like the discussions, but the idea of 'smartest' is dumb, for people to be pondering.

There are original singular ideas/proofs which shake our world, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Each such case is incomparable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

This particular article may as well as said IQ, which is biased nonsense:

> Implicit in this definition of intelligence is general knowledge.

Why is this requirement there? So that this most intelligent being is still "like us"?

Reeding on coin edges predated Newton by 2 centuries; although he implemented it as Master of the Royal Mint, he did not invent the idea.

https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/dictionarydetail/516601

The 'Real Clear' family of websites (news, politics, science) is mostly low quality clickbait. This is an amusing article but the quality level is low.

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.

I would add Richard Feynman to this discussion, not because he created earth shattering discoveries, but because he was able to understand so many things deeply and communicate them in the simplest possible terms, at times back to the experts debating the topic within their respective fields.

I am shocked not to see Erdos mentioned.

Aristotle

Fully half of his life was wasted on theological bullshit. Imagine what he could have contributed if this cancer on humanity hadn’t been force-fed to him since he could speak.

This site, realclearscience.com, just says "you have been blocked", under a banner that says "realclear politics". It also appears to require javascript, and adblockers disabled. So I have no idea what it's all about.

But why does this smell like some far-right toxic crap, masquerading as "science"?