Who was the greatest genius of the 20th century?

Grothendieck

I have a crush on Tesla

Pleb answer: Ramanujan

Anyone else think Einstein is just really lucky? he was retarded as a child, retarded as a university student, he barely got his degree and was such an autists no one would give him a letter of recommendation so he ended up in a patent office. He was also the equivalent of a moon landing denier when it came to quantum mechanics.
But he had a pothead tier idea that ended up being right as far as we know so suddenly he's the greatest scientist ever.

>special and general relativity
>the photoelectric effect
>lucky

also his criticisms of quantum theory were valid and still are today.

Von Neumann. I don't think Frege gets enough credit though, he single-handily invented modern logic and rigorous/not-bullshity philosophy, read his paper, "the thought" if you haven't, its a masterpiece philo.ruc.edu.cn/logic/reading/Frege_The Thought.pdf. He also did some interesting work in geometry, and contributed hugely to the foundations of mathematics.
He gets more credit for computer architecture than he deserves. He is and always will be known as jack and master of all trades rather than a specialist (though it is of course true that he is *the* figure in a few branches of mathematics)
He was much more elitist than Einstein

Einstein was absolutely a paradigm case of genius you contrarian fuck, do you know how much math he invented independently while creating relativity theory?
His criticisms of quantum mechanics were very much reasonable at the time but its not true that they are valid today, bells theorem was the nail in the coffin.

>Von Neumann
no he didn't

this dubs confirm

fuck uuuuuu

Honestly there are so many people that were just brilliant, brilliant thinkers in the 20th century that to call only one of them 'the greatest genius' of the century is impossible.

Hilbert, Noether, Poincaré, Gödel, Feynman, Cantor, Oppenheimer, Weil, ...

And those are just the names I can mention from the early 20th century off the top of my very ignorant head; I'm absolutely sure that the list could have hundreds of entries from all the different fields of science and human knowledge, each one equally brilliant than the other. I know that I function at the most basic psychomotor level, but reading a little about all these extraordinary men and women that poured their entire lives to their passions and transformed our understanding of what it means to be human, really makes me feel more at ease with the world in a very Attenborough, greater than life way.

Dubs confirm this.

> he laid foundation for the computers which you are using to browse Veeky Forums you fags

Who was Alan Turing?

>This is what stupid people tell themselves to feel better

Quibble all you want about the 20th century.

When you da greatest of all time it don't matter.

>not elitist

he was a pompous prick who thought everybody was beneath him in terms of knowledge

This desu. He was practically an engineer

Pshhh... He got the low-hanging fruit.

Samefagging social science major detected!

>dumb enough to make the Turing "test"
Britbong shills pls go

here, I'm majoring in logic and methodology of the sciences

Stop pretending like you know anything about computation

His grades were very good. The thing is, that in Switzerland a 6 is the best grade, whilst in Germany a 1 is the best. It was misread to make weak students like yourself feel good about themselves. Still is. It's utters.
He had many ideas, and somehow figured out a way to put them in beautiful simplicity together.
And he was not an autist, hence the dozens of Einstein quotes.

Anything else? Since your run in irrelevant or bullshit claims is unlikely to be added with factual criticism, you'd actually better spare your time faggot.

Einstein acquired through force of will academic greatness, Feynman's raw, innate understanding of science was more fascinating to me. It's just my opinion.

actually he did get relatively poor grades during his second half at university and he earned a 4.9 average (Mileva & Albert Einstein: Their Love and Scientific Collaboration page 51). Obviously he wasn't dumb but apparently thought lectures to be beneath him, likely do to preoccupation with his own work. he was indeed close to failing.

Nice example of underlying your statements with references.

Just got the idea: wouldn't it be nice to have an option here on Veeky Forums where you can write e.g. "[Source]" and then put your reference into there so that when people read your comment and hover with the mouse of it, there is a pop-up window like when hovering over other comments "" in which your reference appears. It would be a nice clean source/reference system.

Neumann made a lot of small improvements, Einstein made big abstract improvements, Tesla revolutionized the way we live today.

To be honest Tesla made the most change.

Probably some piss poor peasant in a 3rd world country with no access to academia/who died young like Galois or Teichmuller.

He was never retarded. That is a myth.

The most brilliant mathematician of all time is Archimedes. He was doing calculus almost 2000 years before it was invented, and with no algebra whatsoever.

No.

...

in fact, feynman had 3 successful marriages

Thank you for your emotional post.

oh look, another intellectual jackoff thread

Pauling was fucking incredible

He was lucky in the sense that he got into the fields just as they were about to explode, and in the sense that he ended up being given sole credit for what many people contributed to. No matter how smart he was, he could never have been able to work out special relativity if not for all the work already done by Lorentz, Poincare, and so on. Hell, Hilbert published the "Einstein Field Equations" before Einstein actually did.

His famed 1904 photoelectric effect paper for example is actually pretty much a review article. Literally the only thing that was new was the equation K = hv - W

In his famed 1904 special relativity paper, he actually uses equations containing c+v, using a ballistic theory of light. Obviously some other guys refined the theory and fixed that part later.

Literally none of the things you mentioned matter at all when it comes to "greatest genius"

Andrew Wiles isn't even the greatest mathematician alive, let alone better than Gauss. Read some of Gauss's papers, it's really evident how ridiculously. He's one of the few older mathematicians where it's really impossible to call his work "low hanging fruit." Gauss is like Terence Tao/Erdos problem solving skills COMBINED with big picture view o Riemann, Hilbert, Grothendieck.

Frege gets plenty credit from philosophy, just not enough from mathematicians. American/British Philosophers (whoese departments are mostly analytic) universally consider Frege to be one of the top 5 modern philosophers

If your view of genius is this kind of "sees the big picture," type, then Grothendieck is really the only answer. Taking other factors into account, I can see why some people would like others more.

>To be honest Tesla made the most change.
notsureiftrolling.jpg

Tesla invented the AC induction motor, and that's about it.
Oh, he had 300 patents, including some really neat ideas, but most were either useless, variations on someone else's ideas, or some grandiose thing he couldn't actually build.
He patented a tilt-rotor aircraft, like the Osprey, in 1927, but couldn't actually build one.
Ultimately though, he doesn't belong on OP's list because all his successes happened in the 19th century, not the 20th.

Tesla basically invented the 20th century.

Hilbert, Grothendieck, Poincare (if he counts as 20th, Einstein, Von Neumann, Tesla. Maybe Dirac. These guys I can shuffle around for the top places depending on my mood (my mood will change my criteria for "greatest.") I can't really justify anyone else being in their league at the moment.

#
Kolmogorov, Landau,..?

Can we all agree that Edison is a hack ?

Why did you download this picture?

T3$14

Von Neumann in terms of sheer genius.

no heisenberg?

>>Reddit

>Tesla on the same level as Einstein
>Einstein on the same level as Von Neumann
Retard who picks up names from popsci media detected.

Godel desu

I just can't stop thinking, these guys invented such great shit without computers.

Without computers. I repeat.

Really takes the semiconductor down a notch in terms of overall vontrib to humanity in my opinion.

In fact every day I grow more Kevorkian because, I swear to god, people are getting dumber and dumber and everything is getting uglier and uglier. I don't mean things getting old and breaking down. I mean brand new things, ugly from day one. Just offensively ugly.

...

"Einstein was dumb" is something teachers tell kids to make them feel better. His grades, especially in math, were excellent and the myth that he didn't speak till 9 is completely unsubstantiated. He got into a university and got a PhD, which automatically puts him in the top percent of people.

Einstein no question
All Von Neumann ever did is pick a lot of low hanging fruits

This. Gödel is the guy who saw the glitch in the matrix and realized it was just a matrix.

Nobody even mentioned him

>Ultimately though, he doesn't belong on OP's list because all his successes happened in the 19th century, not the 20th.

Yeah he was way ahead of them, he practically invented the 20th century.

Can we all just finally agree that pic related is the greatest scientist in human history?

/thread

define "top percent" is it top 99 percent or wat?

You said genius, not scientist.

...

I want to be 17 again, tbqh family.

Is there anyone who was more of an absolute madman than Woodward?

Nope, that's why he's my personal favorite. Dude would measure his lectures by cigarettes and liquor.

The Alpha and Omega of information, pic related.
Beta Neumann, I liar Godel, can't compute Turing.

Einstein.
Dont know who after that.
Dyson says unequivocally that Dirac was smarter than Feynman. So I guess Dirac must be high up.

I wouldn't put von Neumann up there. Hilbert was considered the pre-eminent mathematician of the post-WWII 20th century.

It was Eckert and Mauchly. Von Neumann was just given credit for it by a guy named Goldstine, who removed Eckert and Mauchly's names from the paper but kept von Neumann's on it. Subsequently everyone came to refer to the work as von Neumann's, even though it really wasn't.

...cont:

I'll nominate Shockley.
There's an interesting quotation about him, from some other scientist in his field, but of a later generation, that half the time someone has come up with a new idea in solid-state physics, they later realise that Shockley had already thought of it.

His name gets dragged through the dirt a lot, obviously, partly because he was a douche to Bardeen and Brattain, and because of his unpopular views on race. On top of that, it is claimed that another bloke, Lilienfeld, invented the transistor and not Shockley. (I dispute this latter point with the assertion that Lilienfeld didn't create the equations nor develop the quantitative understanding that completely defined the field the way that Shockley did.) So it is easy to overlook him on purpose.
He is great becausse Bardeen and Brattain basically pre-empted him and created the contact transistor, and made big names of themselves based on his original idea, so then he locked himself away and, working frantically, thought up a new development, the bipolar jumction transistor, which surpassed Bardeen and Brattains work and restored his name.

You lack information if you are tempted to put Feynman above Neumann.

All those guys, Einstein, Neumann, and Feynman in particular were extroverts and thus they are more in out mind.
Dirac was super smart but an autistic introvert and so people don't know his name.

Continuing with the Russians I posted in , consider
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov
He did a fuckload of stuff, but of course he doesn't have the exposure of a Feynman.

youtu.be/oJG8cmlkPuw

I think I would put Feynman ahead of von Neumann.
His path integral approach to quantum theory was apparently revolutionary; the reason we know Feynman but not Schwinger or Tomonaga (as well as his personality, of course).

The reason we know of Feynman and his personality is: lots of shills, including himself.
And Feynman always considered his work on the weak interactions to be more important, but that is debatable and a different story.

Einstein invented a new reality.

They think einstein is a meme.

Turing has to be mentioned. He was recognized for his work in recursion theory, probability & statistics, cryptology and even did work in Lie algebra and type theory

turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/13

kek

He was homosexual, hence no genius.

I'll mention a non-physicist:

People who read about population genetics, evolutionary biology, etc. will likely have come across Ronald Fisher. I'll just quote from the wiki:

>Anders Hald called him "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science",[4] while Richard Dawkins named him "the greatest biologist since Darwin. Not only was he the most original and constructive of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Fisher also was the father of modern statistics and experimental design. He therefore could be said to have provided researchers in biology and medicine with their most important research tools, as well as with the modern version of biology's central theorem."[5] and Geoffrey Miller said of him "To biologists, he was an architect of the 'modern synthesis' that used mathematical models to integrate Mendelian genetics with Darwin's selection theories. To psychologists, Fisher was the inventor of various statistical tests that are still supposed to be used whenever possible in psychology journals. To farmers, Fisher was the founder of experimental agricultural research, saving millions from starvation through rational crop breeding programs."[6]

Anglos have a brilliant legacy in evolutionary biology, obviously starting with Darwin. At the same time as Fisher were Haldane and Sewall Wright, two more Anglos who established population genetics. After them came W. Hamilton, whom, judging from my reading on the subject, has been the best biologist since then; and of course E. O. Wilson.

The only non-Anglo name that pops into my head when thinking about this field is Mendel. If not for Mendel, I'd be tempted to credit almost the entire broad field of population genetics to Anglos; or at least to consider Anglos as the few main directors of the field.

Oh: And add John Maynard Smith to that list of influential biologists, of course.

>I'm majoring in logic and methodology of the sciences
Is this philosophy with a focus on the analytic school? cause I can't find the major.

>Anglos have a brilliant legacy in evolutionary biology
Makes sense, as they all stem from an inbred fuckfest island

He was just really good at delivering impassioned speeches

Shut up Jacob.

I came here to post this.

I don't care. I got 9/10 on math and physics in High school too. I'm smart but lazy like Einstein!

It depends on what you mean by "greatest". Most influent? Most number of discoveries? Most respected? Relative to his time or not?

Cantor.

Greatest Genius?
I would say Neumann, Stalin, or pre-mental decline Hitler. But it depends on your personal basis.

...

von Neumann is probably the only one of these to be considered a genius.

Roy Hinkley

google.com/search?q=roy hinkley