Smartest known man of all time

JVN

socrates

Adolf Hitler desu, if you disagree you are cucks.

Praise kek

What is he holding there anyway? Is it a feather pen?

it's a blunt lmao

I can't, I can respect both sides of the argument.

swiss cyclist steve morabito

The actively used vocabulary in his writing covers 80.000 different words.

>Goethe is the Leader of Isis

This is like fucking Escaflowne

Different languages though...

Whats going on in here?

he was smart young and stayed very smart, but how's he the ultimate?

He solved philosophy TWICE.

have sex with boys

1

If you are going to choose multi-talents as your base for determining who was the smartest (I will read this as the most intelligent) person of all time, then I guess that Leonardo da Vinci is a better choice than Goethe.

>Leonardo’s drawings are some of the greatest and most famous of all time, while Goethe’s small lyrics and short poems are mostly read only in Germany: they loose a lot in translation, something that doesn’t happen, for example, with Shakespeare’s poems (who mostly maintain their magic even when translated, since they tend to concentrate their power much more in metaphors and imagery than in sounds).

>Leonardo’s bigger works, the paintings, are much more famous and were much more influential than Goethe’s bigger works, even his Faust. Again, the Faust is mostly read only in Germany, and, as drama and poetry, it cannot hold comparison with the great poetry of Shakespeare’s plays, or with Homer, or Dante. Leonardo, however, can seriously face the great painters of all time, even with his small body of work.

>Goethe’s scientific projects are not original and generally wrong. You can say the same about a lot of Leonardo’s work: his machines would not work in real life, they are mostly the work of imagination, and the same with Goethe’s theory of colors: such works can be viewed as art, but not as serious engineering and scientific achievements. However, Leonardo’s anatomical drawings were sublime, the best by far that humanity would see in hundreds of years. If they have been published during his lifetime they would be tremendously influential. They were even used as source for many of the great anatomical treatises of the XIX and XX centuries. Furthermore, Leonardo’s find fossils of oceanic creatures on top of mountains, and proposed that those areas were, in the distant past, all covered by the sea: that was a great perception, although Leonardo did not imagined anything like the movement of the tectonic plates.

>Leonardo was actually a good writer. His writings show a promising proto-writer, with something of the talents of Galileo: he has a limpid and clear prose, and constantly uses imagery drawn from the natural world (mostly similes). That means that he was also gifted in the verbal field.

>Leonardo was almost alone in his time and place when one things that he could actually perceive that most of the scholars of the time were mostly making philosophical questions that would lead one to nowhere, all those nebulous clouds of metaphysical dreams that could be sustained for years and years of talk with no actual result. He very early perceive that one will achieve much more by closely studding nature, the actual physical world, trying to deep always more profoundly on its details.

2

Now, that is one example of someone to dethrone Goethe if we think that multitasking is the gold-standard for intelligence. However, intelligence is a very elusive and complicated subject, and there is no clear consensus as what it really is. A simple example of the problems in these discussions is this one: is creativity to be considered part of intelligence or it is separated from it?

About Leonardo and Goethe: they tried their hands on many fields, but can we really say they were great on all those fields? To actually be capable of achieving great results one must demand a lot of time and effort, and time is limited for all human beings. Since neither Leonardo nor Goethe had all the time in the world in their hands, it is natural to see that many of the “fields on which they work” are only touched, only superficially plowed. It is one thing for scholars and admirers of those men to put under their wings several “realizations” in “different areas of human endeavor”, but it is another to actually consider these fingerprints as actual and durable realizations. If one really acts with cold logic is perfectly visible that Leonardo was mostly a draftsman and painter, and Goethe a writer. They might have tried their hands on other fields, but with no significant achievement.

If we are going to search for a multi-tasking person who actually made great achievements in slightly different fields, then Michelangelo is greater. He was a great sculptor, a great painter, a quite able smaller poet, and a quite able smaller architect.

3

Then there is other considerations. We can ask ourselves: what field of action is the one that demands more of human intelligence? Maybe the achievements of Newton and Einstein, of Gauss and Euler are extremely more demanding that the ones of any single artist.

And then we can also ask: what if a single artist was actually so great in his particular field that he outshines every other multi-talented person? Shakespeare’s poetic voice is awe-inspiring: he piles one memorable image upon another with almost unbelievable ease. He also created more characters than most other writers and worked with several different life philosophies and subject matters. Can we say with absolute certainty that he could not have had a more impressive brain than Goethe and Leonardo?

And finally:

>don't want to here shit about...but there could be an african boy in some village who was never known

It was probably a Chinese farmer in a village who was never known and did not have the chance to bloom.

gave me a good chortle

Bump

They were equally right (or equally wrong) in the end.

He made that song "Somebody That I Used To Know" with Kimbra.

ok thanks for replying, im really glad youre gettin it out and fillingg out our survey and we appreciate the feedback man

but check this out, i wont read about it or your exploits you monday to friday dubble bubble bitch hahaha, think i care? here i am talking about it against my will. i am powerful, one powerful man with temperance and acceptance to many different types of translucent diodes and pieces of shit like bulbs. its statistically impossible to kill me with any kind of blunt weapon but explain why 8 people have killed me with a mace? really makes you think

Leonardo was never a statesman. He didn't apply that much of his creativity in practice(pragmatic matters).

lol

>revolutionize the German language (there's a reason why the Goethe Institut exists)
>was a politician of some sort, I forget exactly what he did but I think it was something like a senator
>did some work in science and mathematics
>wrote the greatest piece of literature in history

>>wrote the greatest piece of literature in history

Wow, slow down there. Even Goethe himself would admit that Shakespeare’s main tragedies and works like A Midsummer Night Dream, The Tempest and the Henry IV are superior in poetry and in characters than his own Faustus.

And I guess that if you would choose a single work of literature then The Divine Comedy, or The Iliad or the Odyssey and (and to me this would be the one) War and Peace all are greater than Faustus.

Is this some pasta?

>was a politician of some sort, I forget exactly what he did but I think it was something like a senator
He was Geheimrat, meaning he had a place on the city council, specifically in regards to infrastructure. He famously had a big road paved.

I genuinely believe his Faust is perfect. He was being very modest.
Close enough, I know nothing of German politics even now.

Sorry, but no.

There are no people that can compete with this guy. Newton, Gauss, and the greatest of the Greeks are like roaches to him. We'll likely never get anyone like him for a very, very long time.

>gaub
smart

It's both

He gardened, did philosphy, and played the banjo

>I genuinely believe his Faust is perfect. He was being very modest.

Seconded.

fuck off, meme-fag

He's not even the smartest German. I'd have to put have to put him under Gauss and Leibniz.

Don't forget Schiller.

There's nothing "meme" about him. The greatest mathematicians of that time all agreed he was the best the world had ever seen.

Kollegah has a bigger vocabulary and he is not even the best german rapper

If you disagree you obviously haven't read deeply and broadly.

Vocabulary is irrelevant.

Thesaurus rap is trash.

>Leibniz
>German

Fuck off like.

Yes that's what I wanted to say to the goethe has the biggest vocabulary user. Goethe is still the best but vocabulary size is not necessarily a sign of literary greatness.

*Kike

There are several lists here, and in none of the Von Neumann is in the first place:

eoht.info/page/Greatest mathematician ever

There is also this one study (not the most viable, but still, it is one more list), and again, no Von Neumann:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment

Also, is curious how you find many Jewish scientists make great hipe comments about their other Jewish friends, almost as if they were defending their own category, like Judges and Medical Doctors do with their peers.

And again: Von Neumann was great in mathematics. He could not write like Shakespeare, no matter how much he tried, or paint and sculpt like Michelangelo.

Who is he?
t. pleb

>Le language games man

He's a famous Austrian meme kind of like Speed is for the Finn's.

This.

>Human Accomplishment index for physics
>places Einstein in 2nd

I don't even need to read the rest to realize this is absolute tripe. Fuck, I'm fuming.

He wouldn't even consider himself to be in the top 1000s

Modesty is a sign of intelligence.

I have a 144 composite IQ score tested with the WAIS, at age 19, and I'd consider myself as extremely modest.

Really? Why?
I didn't see anything special about it. It's not awful but there wasn't very much memorable, touching, or interesting about it, and it was marred by disunity.

Admittedly, it was translated, and I only could find The First Part of the Tragedy at the time- is The Second Part of the Tragedy that much better?

kek

If you have only read the first part, you haven't really read it.

>Go Ethel ISIS

what does it mean? who is Ethel?

it's that much different anyways

None of the other lists (look the first link, there are several sources there) put Von Neumann among the top five of all time.

He was very intelligent, no doubt about that, but there is a lot of hipe and myth thrown upon him, and maybe even some personally made by him.

But Einstein, for example, was not only more creative and influential than Von Neumann, but also a greater and wiser human being. But still, both are humans. I don’t know where this tendency to see Neumann as a god has erupted, by I suspect it came after the Wikipedia article on him was made (with that section about the personal gossips of other Jewish scientists and anecdotal evidences).

Well, he has interesting ideas and whatnot, but in terms of having produced something really extraordinary and meaningful (I don't see how else we could measure intelligence desu, it should be tangibly demonstrated) he's not the best candidate. I'm sure he'd agree.

"smart" is such a loaded term

Be more specific, what kind of smart?

I assume you mean smart as in capable of being proficient in many fields. A genius for sure, but a genius within the understanding and terms of a standard or above average human being.

However there are geniuses such as Newton, Einstein, or Tesla that are not fathomable to normal men. They weren't as proficient in as many fields, but the sheer mental power of those kinds of people is something that we can't really imagine without having that much genetic capacity for mathematical thoughts.

Wittgenstein

Shakespeare, Beethoven, Newton, Einstein, Gauss, Euler, Michelangelo.

>did science
not exactly this, he did not learn math and therefore could not argument on the normal Newton's axioms, his own theory of atoms goes back to the Ancient Greece, this is the downside of this actually really great, last universal genius

That's still science, and I am not using the modern sense of the word 'science'.

>compile a list of the top 10, 50, 100 smartest people
>it'll be almost all white and all male every time

Why the fuck was I born a DOUBLE second-rate

only possible answer reporting in

It's a running gag between my bf and me, how stupid Goethe was. We had to read shitloads of his works in school and studied some of his other (e.g. color theory) works in our free time and most of it is actually low quality or plain wrong (not even the right approaches, like Newton or Leibniz, or even the statistics-faking Mendel). Reading letters between Lachmann and J. Grimm, I've even noticed that Goethe's contemporaries didn't like how he craved for attention without actually achieving any real scientific insight.

>revolutionize the German language (there's a reason why the Goethe Institut exists)

Not even remotely if you read any works of his time or before. Just a regular author.

>modestly is a sign of social intelligence.
fixed
having a good gauge of your skills and abilities is real impt in the decision making process and even the meta decision making process.

How is Leibniz not a German?

Genius is so varied in its forms that it's really outrageous to try and compile a list that means anything.

How is one to compare Bach with Shakespeare, or Picasso with Martha Graham, or Alexander the Great with Wayne Gretzky?

You just did by placing them all in a "genius" category, however nebulous.

People like to put him because he was broadly focused but this user might not be too far off the mark.

If you must go with a more universal genius try Aristotle or Leibniz

this too

neither of you understood the obvious sarcasm in That having been said, Sam Harris is no more intelligent than R. Dawkins or C. Hitchens from whom he steals most of his rhetoric. I enjoyed Waking Up, but he's extremely arrogant and pedantic, showcased most embarrassingly in Ham: Slices of a Life.

...

The American Liebniz.

really gets your brainal neurons firing rapidly OP

>the greatest piece of literature in history
G*rman detected

this guy
literally changed the world forever in 20 years

What did Gauss even do?

How was Thomas Aquinas "smart"?

>arguably best logician of all time
>Successfully moved past Kant in a more meaningful than Hegel or anyone else
>Accurately described how meaning is made and functions
>Grounds science without falling into materialist or positivist traps
>Best theory of truth
>Dissolves all dualisms, allows hard Empiricism while preserving Universals

Ill agree with this one

Better than the Rationalists that followed, but still wrong about a good amount of logic.

I am a third generation Dutch immigrant and I've just recently started learning German (and at the moment I couldn't even be able to understand say, kindergarten-level German)

I agree that Pierce is probably the greatest american philosopher of all time, an absolute genius

but do you honestly think he is a better logician than Frege?

Wagner by a country mile

His ministry was about 2 years

Prove it, you fucking gaylord.

wat

Have you read anything he's written beyond the five proofs?

just give me a run down why you say he is smart?