Ask HN: Who is the smartest person you've ever known and why?
(no need to be famous) smart in the broadest meaning of the word
They also avoid doing fringe research in academia, making them not typically stand out when they happen to have researched the new hot topic.
I've known also a few people that either founded $100B+ public companies or did research like people like to talk about in HN "All you need is attention" and they weren't the smartest, but smart enough, but were quite lucky on their journeys and to be in the right place and in the right time
The smartest person I've ever met, according to others, was Earl Pace[1], a retired Westinghouse engineer who designed and implemented the control systems for the 6 stand cold reduction mill at US Steel in Gary, Indiana. Pulling steel like taffy with huge motors, and a compound system involving DC generators as huge operational amplifiers strained the absolute limits of what could be done with 1964 technology, yet it ran for decades.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/obituaries/earl-c-pace-in/
I think of "smart" as highly situational. I've known people with genius math or programming skills who can't change a tire or follow a recipe for making pasta.
the title char limit made it hard to word :_
I agree with you, that's why I used "in the broad sense" otherwise we will all be saying Torvalds, Cerf, Berners-Lee, and the likes :p
I worked for a smart guy years ago. Two PhDs math and comp sci, serial entrepreneur, wealthy. He probably taught me more than anyone else ever did. I wrote almost all the core code for a sophisticated oil and gas exploration system back in the early 80s. Then he screwed me out of equity in the company when he sold it for tens of millions.
I worked with some amazing people at Apple, very smart, many of them on the spectrum as well.
When I think of smart people I know of, but don’t know personally, Umberto Eco comes to mind.
I test as smart and do well enough professionally, have a decent education, but my wife and even my six-year-old granddaughter can outwit me. I think of all three of my children as smart but of course every parent thinks that.
In my lifetime, I've gotten to know only two people who were unambiguous geniuses (although being a genius is a different thing than being smart). They were both broken people otherwise, and they led me to think that if that's the price of genius, then I'm very glad that I'm not one.