Has there ever been someone as equivalently intelligent or accomplished as Jansci?
I'm not being rhetorical, it seems like he might be the single most accomplished man in history and it is genuinely very difficult for me to find an equivalent or better.
Does Veeky Forums have any candidates?
Additionally I have a little known story by Wigner about his incredible abilities by mental calculation. They have been mythologized greatly I suspect by Halmos' publication "The Legend of John Von Neumann" which is as far as I can tell the origin of the legend that he could divide an eight digit number by an eight digit number in his head.
"I have a story against him, if you want to hear it. I once told him that I just read, to my amazement, that somebody could multiply two 5-digit figures in his head. He said, "That's wonderful. I'll try it also. " I gave him two 5-digit figures. He went to the corner, as he always did when he wanted to think hard, looked up, and mumbled. He did that for about five minutes, and then he came back with a product. I said, "Wonderful, congratulations." He said, "Is it correct? " I said, "No, but to get any result is wonderful." It is very difficult, almost impossible, to multiply two 5-digit figures in your head. After all, for what purpose was paper discovered?"
Da Vinci was pretty smart but it's hard to compare people living in completely different eras.
Mason Morales
What about John Forbes Nash Jr?
I know that Jansci basically created the field of Game Theory but whose discoveries were more significant/original?
Zachary Brown
Why did he steal other mathematicians works and claimed he came up with them if he was so smart?
Nathaniel Sanders
If you're going to make a thread like this at least talk about their actual accomplishments and not their ability to do inconsequential number crunching in their head
Yes, it's impressive. No, I can't do it. Yes, back then they didn't have the computing power to do a calculation like that in an efficient timeframe. But that doesn't make it anymore of an argument that they're smart and accomplished than saying (insert random autist here) can do quadruple integrals in their head
Blake Sanders
Part of the point of the thread is me sorting the mythology from the reality.
Perhaps he is much inferior to Euler, Isaac Newton but it appears to me that he is the most accomplished man in history.
I gave an example that at least one of his claimed abilities was real but much exaggerated. Maybe he was not the genius he is often purported to be.
Part of me thinks that Feynman may have been smarter but I'm not sure.
I kind of just wanted to sort myth from reality.
Henry Lopez
I'm trying to figure out how much mythology surrounds this guy.
He has a long list of accomplishments and people make grandiose claims about his abilities but how do both stack up?
I was asking people better aware of his accomplishments than I am to compare and contrast them with other candidates for most accomplished scientist.
Jason White
ah. ok. I wouldn't concern myself with the "mythological" shit surrounding him (like the multiplication example)
Just focus on what you can know about his work - that alone should show you just how fucking brilliant the guy was
Alexander White
>But that doesn't make it anymore of an argument that they're smart [...] It kinda does. I spend a lot of time on the internet and it happens to read about people who had eidetic abilities when they were younger. Sort of like their minds being collimated into razor focus concentration. A state in which retrieval of information and mental calculation are effortless. This is not uncommon among accomplished meditators, with memory being the least impressive feat.
Chase Cooper
Half of the anecdotes about him are probably bullshit, the other half are probably practical jokes.
Like the story about him reciting 20 minutes worth of a tale of two cities even though he only read it once 15 years ago. Or him memorizing telephone books for fun.
Fuck you human memory doesn't work that way.
Isaac Diaz
Kim Peek could.
Josiah Ward
But Kim Peek (the basis of Rain Man) also had severe disabilities. I'm not saying that you can't have those abilities without equivalent disabilities, but there's probably a reason we see so much perfect recall, eidetic memory, and other weird abilities in people whose minds are, for all intents and purposes, defective.
Brandon Flores
Maybe Madara Uchiha?
Justin Smith
What about his monumental list of accomplishments?
I don't actually think there's a longer list of accomplishments on wikipedia (Maybe Gauss, Euler, Erdos). I know that sounds silly but the sheer volume of shit attributed to him is immense.
For the record I'm not a STEM guy I'm just on the periphery hence my deferring to you guys.
Ryder Barnes
Johnny certainly accomplished a lot but also got into the habit of getting his name plastered on things he was only minimally involved in a lot as well. Von Neumann architecture comes to mind.
Jayden Smith
I heard he was also pretty uninvolved in the Von Neumann alegbras once.
But I'm unfamiliar.
Josiah Rivera
>Fuck you human memory doesn't work that way. You're simply envious because you have a shitty memory. Life is tough and often when you're born with shit genes there's not much you can do.
Levi Reed
...
Benjamin Gray
Oliver Sacks - The man who mistook his wife for a hat.
Nicholas Ramirez
>it seems like he might be the single most accomplished man in history and it is genuinely very difficult for me to find an equivalent or better. He never came up with anything truly groundbreaking, almost all of his work is low hanging fruit. Even his best known accomplishment, Von Neumann Architecture, was the work of two engineers and misattributed to him (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Development_of_the_stored-program_concept). I don't deny that he was extremely intelligent though.
Alexander Ward
Euler
Similar ability for mental calculation and memorization More influential accomplishments
Gavin Thompson
Any examples of the former ability?
I hear he could, I've just never heard an example.
Camden Morales
>Life is tough and often when you're born with shit genes there's not much you can do. >you have shit genes if you're not in the 99.9999999999 percentile for mental calculation and memory recall abilities Not him, but wew
Connor Hughes
>all six thousand pages of it >ALL SIX THOUSAND PAGES OF IT >[math]\mathcal{SIX\ THOUSAND}[/math]
Jacob Diaz
Terence Tao said that Von Neumann was *may be* the last polymath. Who are you to say Tao is wrong about his judgment? youtu.be/eNgUQlpc1m0?t=51m44s
Robert Long
I'm exaggerating but clearly the user is buttmad about other people having a really good memory (mind you one is not bound to be a retard to have an outstanding memory) and cannot cope with it. I have bad memory as well (don't have a clear flash about what I did yesterday unless a make some effort, haven't always been like this) but I'm not mad about this.
Christian Taylor
so youre telling me its entirely possible that you have been giving handjobs to strangers and raging because of your shitty memory yesterday?
James Cox
>Feynman smarter than von Neumann nice b8
Lucas Edwards
I have bad memory, not blackouts. Like sometimes I have to think about the part (month) of the year we're in. It has to do with awful mood/depression. Not the self loathing stuff though. I'm going to the shitter at a faster peace than most.
Brody White
he architected modern functional analysis for the purpose of describing quantum mechanics
learn basic functional analysis and look at how intricately it is designed to see how much of a genius jvn was.
Mason Cook
Apparently he did some difficult computation in his head to 5 decimal places to settle a dispute between two students
It also probably gave him a lot of mental power in the same way JVN could with examples being his ability to easily factorize and see patterns no one else could.
Cameron Collins
What's sad about Jansci is that he was terribly afraid of death, he even converted to catholicism but his priest said it didn't console him, but he didn't know what to do with it.
After a life of solving so many sudoku puzzles he never really understood his purpose or the big picture of life. Oh well, guess having a 160 IQ and super-memory isn't that great.
