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Comment by ppsreejith | Hacker News Reader

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

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How about Ramanujan? (A mathematician, obviously, but not European.)

He falls more towards the idiot savant side for me. Not because he was necessarily dumb, but he channeled his intelligence in such useless ways. All raw intellect, and no cohesion, theme or application.

I read his story as a cautionary tale, along with Euler, someone to be pitied.

Plato, Da Vinci, Einstein tried to make sense of the bigger picture. They grounded their intellect in the real world.

thats because he was entirely self taught.. I'm sure if he had the upbringing of western high society like most famous european mathematicians, he would probably have more of the cohesion you are talking about

Some of the smartest professors I’ve had, in terms of academic ranking, were millionaires for doing graph-based algo companies that got acquired, others were virgins who lived with their mom.

Intelligence alone doesn’t seem like it automatically leads to success in all possible ways; some mathematicians just don’t care about wealth.

Came to say the same. For those thinking that his works were "too far out there", they were merely ahead of our time.

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

> Of his thousands of results, all but a dozen or two have now been proven correct.

It is somewhat depressing to realize that the disease that killed him would be easily treatable now. And we would have results of 40+ extra years of his productivity.

Not just now, it was treatable then, he was just misdiagnosed

I think also Archimedes, especially given he meets the polymath part of the author's approach.

From the article:

> William Shakespeare or Ludwig van Beethoven

And the author explains why the others don't qualify, in his opinion.

OTOH, he also mentions that Newton was autistic, without any bloody evidence, except the buzzfeed remark that he was reclusive.

> 2. Plato

I'd lean more towards Aristotle.

Da Vinci isn't European?

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