What is the smartest person in recorded history? Ramanujan? Von Neumann? William James Sidis?

>I'm not talking about achievements
What good intelligence if not for achievements?

Many achievements are awarded posthumously if the person is avant-garde or marginalized (e.g. Cantor) so if we base intellect on achievements then the ladder is always changing.

Donald J. Trump

Which one?

>books.google.com.br/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA379&lpg=PA379&dq=newton reread book many times&source=bl&ots=rD9sTflKuS&sig=mgXmvRt6cR8YYZU9RMTDc8fYn4o&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjA2viUkITSAhWHW5AKHe7VDo4Q6AEISTAH#v=onepage&q=newton reread book many times&f=false
>At much the same time, Newton reread Descartes's Geometry. Sixteen years earlier, by his own account, he had struggled throught it alone, three or four pages at a time
As much as he was a genius, he indeed had his own struggles, and I don't think any of the people I mentioned at the OP would have needed to undergo that. I think he was a genius in a more conventional way, and his cognitive abilities just gave him a head start.

>What good intelligence if not for achievements?
Achievements are indeed way more important than intelligence, but I'm just curious to know who was the smartest person.

Sidis by far was the brainlet. Ramumujan was born to churn out conjectures like nothing. Neumann could do almost every STEM best in the world, and he could beat liberal arts nerds at their own game when he wanted to, like in Byzantine history.

>Sidis could read The New York Times at 18 months.
>By age 8, he had reportedly taught himself 8 languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) and invented another, which he called Vendergood.
>In early 1910, Sidis' mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies.
Von Neumann only learned 7 seven languages his entire life. Though he ended up mastering mathematics, I don't think he was able to teach at an university at 12.

Call me a newfag, but that flat Earth put a smile on my face. Thanks.

What are the odds that the most intelligent human ever was born before we started writing stuff down? In 100000* years of Homo sapiens I find it pretty unlikely that the definitive smartest human could ever be known. Newton is one of the smartest people in recorded history no doubt, and even he recognized that he was only standing on the shoulders of giants. A caveman (or cavewoman) doesn't have such an advantage, so the fact that he wasn't creating GUTs doesn't mean he wasn't an immensely smart individual.

*Behaviourally modern humans probsbly only occured about 50k years ago

That's why I said "the smartest person in recorded history"

newfag

so he was basically a retard neet that become a genius.

thats what true genius is, and newton still wins.

...

Michael Faraday

goethe

>Cantor
Didn't he come up with set theory, and was ridiculed at the time?

this

can someone give me a rundown

Ramanujan was probably not the smartest, he just had a ton of intuition (and arguably help from supernatural forces).

>arguably help from supernatural forces
>supernatural forces
>supernatural

hehe

Underrated choice

Copypaste meme theory of bog relativity

Probably not some semi-autistic scientist or mathematician, but someone who acquired power and access.

I say this as a physicist

Kolmogorov

You really think a person who's that intelligent would make such pursuits? If anything I say, someone who's smart enough would realize power and success are pointless and would focus on whatever interests that person had.

That's a real smart observation there jimbo

Grigori Perelman

So Von Neumann, who helped develop the atomic bomb?

if we're talking about intelligence itself then this guy

youtube.com/watch?v=Q-HXSHXUtFw

The pursuit for power and success is as pointless as everything else. Life is pointless.
Furthermore, that kind of pursuit is entirely emotional, so no matter how intelligent or how dumb a person is, if they are emotionally inclined to power, they will go after it.
The "people who are truly smart choose to live common lives pursuing their own interests rather than power" idea is a meme created by weak and unambicious people who think the rest of the world think like them.

Barnett

This. This guy is a fucking genius

>unambicious
nice

I've always subscribed to the idea that humans are smarter now than they were before. Now that doesn't mean that their potentials are the same. There's very good reason to believe that Bobby Fischer would be the chess player on the planet if he was born 20-30 years ago.

The answer to this question is probably the Veeky Forums memes in all honesty. Mochizuki, Terrence Tao, and Perelman would all be good picks.

While Mochizuki's interpretations on math might be proven to be mostly nonsense in the future, there's also a decent chance that we will see him as having the highest "power gap" between his peers of all time. Newton was almost beat to the punch with calculus and Einstein was maybe 10-15 years ahead of the curve. Mochizuki is way ahead of that. My best guess would honestly be 50+ years if his work is mostly valid, but like everyone else in the world, I can't understand pretty much any of it.

It's probably perelman or tao due to modern resources, but Mochizuki could be the GOAT when we're old.

Define intelligence.

Something your lacking because you are unable to look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary on your own.
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence
>(1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations

INT vs WIS, user.

me
>tfw high iq extraordinaire

Logic and creativity.
Only brainlets like you are unable to define it.

it's hard to tell since psychometry is a very young field and even now people question the validity of IQ tests to measure intelligence and the nature / definition of intelligence itself.

quickrundown.club/

GOAT? Nigga please...

Plenty of people have had ideas their contemporaries did not understand. Evariste Galois is the first example that comes to mind. He was rejected and/or ignored by both Cauchy, Fourier AND Poisson, and died without recognition for essentially inventing modern abstract algebra.

But there are many, MANY more. This Mochizuki guy might be very smart, but unlike so many geniuses that struggled for recognition through what must have looked like a failed life, he is already an established academic with fanboys. You might have a skewed view of reality here.

As for GOAT...

Knuth, Gauss, Riemann, Euler, Arkimedes, Euclid, da Vinci, Turing, Einstein, Newton, Liebniz, Abel, Tesla, Erdös, Noether, Lie, Gödel, Galois, Fermat, Klein, Ramanujan, von Neumann, Pascal... I could go on and on... There are so many strong candidates!

You seem to be forgetting what Isaac Newton stated as:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

My friend Steven

I remember him, the smartest bar bouncer of all times.

"Abstract: Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific
model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality
of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract
currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the
information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained)
description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying
mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical
to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic
Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic.
Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes
reality as a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language
characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and selfexecution
(reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of
infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic
operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive
syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines
itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational
constraint."

megafoundation.org/CTMU/Articles/Langan_CTMU_092902.pdf

Which one?

indeed he did, and lets not forget about Boltzmann! He discerned a profound thermodynamical constant and was mocked and ridiculed all the way to suicide.... and after that everyone realized he was actually correct the whole time

Me, as I'm the only person that objectively exists.

St Thomas Aquinas

...

...

fucking what?

> Claims to be the smartest person in the world.

> Believes in a God, in this millenium.

> Thinks the world would be better if we were all cynically controlled assholes, and so has no concept of whether, and if so why, living itself is meaningful. Seems totally unable to grasp a meta view of "progress".

That's a total fail. This guy clearly isn't very smart. And if he has a high IQ score, that's a testament to the weaknesses of IQ tests today.

I understand points 1 and 3, but I don't understand the trend on Veeky Forums to dog on people who believe in God. There are many successful, educated, and intelligent scientists and mathematicians (alive in this millennium) who are also devout believers.

Newton obviously. To develop calculus and physics by himself required a top grade autism.
>inb4 Leibniz
They both develop calculus independently.

But Einstein was smart as fuck too. He did the same shit Newton did to mechanics, but with a different kind of space time.
>Von Newmann
He's just a fucking meme. Smart but not that smart if you understand what I mean

It's mostly because atheism is cool boi, all of my favourite scientist like Dawkins are atheists, that means it's cool.

I think if von Neumann was as autistic as Newton, then he could have done wonders in a small number of fields. Instead, he chose to be really, really good in a lot of fields and a huge expert in some others, but never Newton-tier in a single one.

>Ramanujan

hahah..hahahahahah..hahahhHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Archimedes

Still think on Nicola tesla or da Vinci.

Believing in some God is an emotional thing. We like to think we have some guide, friend, closeness, meaning, master, leader of the herd... Plus it plays into our ego to think we are part of something greater. And of course there is the community aspect of serving a common cause with others. You see this in wars too, it can be very bonding.

As for actually believing in that stuff in 2017...

First of all, let's consider specific religions, such as christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism... With their holy books and prophets.

Now, we live in a world where we are familiar with several such concurrent religions. Religion A might say you go to hell if you practice religion B, and vice versa. How do we know which religion is correct? The answer is: We don't. It's all down to blind faith, and this faith is usually whatever you happened to be raised with. Logically, the correct faith could be any of the common narratives, or something else entirely. You can make your own religion because you feel like it, and maybe that is the ultimate truth! There is just no holding ground for choosing one faith over another.

Also, these mainstream religions are proven wrong, and have been for centuries. We know now that "heaven" is not some place full of angels and dead people, because we can go there and have a look. We also know the earth isn't flat, it clearly wasn't made in 7 days, and so on. We have extensive historical documentation of holy scriptures being destroyed, selected or changed for political reasons. We know that the various prophets and disciples have contradicting stories about the same events, even within the same religion. We understand that Noa's ark is infeasible, that humans evolved from primates (not Adam and Eve, or Ask and Embla), we know thunder is not caused by a guy wielding a hammer... I could go on... In short, we know the traditional tales are bullshit. Even the church has said for a long time that the bible is just symbolism. But then there is no reason to take any of those stories at face value.

As for a more abstract kind of supernatural "holy spirit" (one that would be interested in our much desired "purpose"), that is also an outdated concept.

We accept that there are things we don't yet understand, but we have changed our dominant mindset to being interested in figuring them out, not just believing in something "beyond us". That's a really important thing. With this mindset, we have challenged miracle workers, magicians, prophets, psychics etc. to do something inexplicable for centuries. Scientists would be very interested if they could. Sure, we have discovered loads of stuff that would seem like magic to people 2000 years ago, and we understand how they could be dumbstruck by a spark, hallucinations, plagues, con artists or simple probable coincidences (including pareidolia). But there are no actual magicians and miracle workers. Close examinations for an extended period of time have dismissed "supernatural influence" as a common misunderstanding.

Also, the whole idea of a spirit to guide us is very egocentric, and rather silly. It goes with the idea that humans are somehow totally disctinct from (other) animals; that the sun, stars and entire universe revolves around us. This is seen today to be a misconception. We are just the top animals on earth, according to our own concept of being on top (which is not for example "biggest", "quickest", "longest living" or "most populous"). Why do we assume we have some special role that is so important that a whole set of supernaturals would exist just to cater to us? Why would superbeings care so much about the homo sapiens on Tellus? It makes no sense.

And even if we were the center of the universe, why would an allmighty being need to create imperfect humans and spend so much time meddling in the minute affairs of their lifes? It's just silly. Why do we even assume an allmighty being would think in the same sort of way that we do? Anger, love, blame, worhsip, happiness, commands, sadness, sin... These are human emotions. Our instincts, stumbled upon by evolution, and quite random and meaningless in view of the entire universe. They just mean a lot _to_us_. The classical scriptures, as well as modern artists, go so far as to decribe "God" as some bearded old man who likes to have a chat with us. This speaks volumes about the psychology behind religious faith. But believing that this makes sense is just ridiculous.

So what are we left with, if we still insist on believing in some god? Well, you can try to believe in some universal "force", far removed from humans, who put this all together. But if you imply that this entity has some sort of consciousness, it just adds unfounded complexity to what we are observing, without explaining anything: Who created god then? And why? And if it was random, or "just happened", then what's to say the same is not true for humans, and the universe itself?
The major religions are obvious figments of human psychology. Whatever concept of "god" there might be (and granted: this is a hard thing to define, let alone disprove), it clearly is not observable as a conscious being, and all measurements, probability and reason tells us it has no bearing on our day to day lives (beyond science, aka "laws of nature"). So we might as well live as atheists.

It seems much more intelligent to directly study human well-being, nature, science, mathematics etc., than to worship some random mysticism. Being an atheist doesn't mean you can't marvel in awe at the world around you, and care about human happiness. To the contrary: This awe and caring sparked the creation of religions. It resides within human nature in the first place.

Atheists might be robbed of a certain feeling of grandure that Bach, Newton and so on benifited from. But I for one would rather live in the real world than worship a random book, and I couldn't fool myself into becoming religious even if I wanted to (short of getting some mental illness involving genuine psychosis). On the bright side, I like to think well founded atheism makes me more reflected and reflecting. I am able to constantly reevaluate what I think, see relativism (different viewpoints), and I would have a hard time supporting something like a holy war.

Imhotep desu

PS:

I am guessing you, religious user, live in USA. Your insistance on religious faith over there goes well with the president worshiping and flag worshiping that you rely on to keep your too-big, dubious history country so unified and stable. I think it's good for both the world and you guys that you got a president now that is so obviously human.

Hopefully you will break up into nation states after a while. That would relax some of your authority worship, and open the gates for more interesting development. Hopefully you would feel a collective responsibility for the environment, but with less inclinement to invade/bomb other nations and stuff like that.

nikola tesla was by far the smartest person ever, he was a god

Euler, Euler, Euler?

...

Leonard Euler
Bernoulli
Newton
Hilbert
Pythagoras
George Kant
Kurt Godel
Stephen Hawking
Elon Musk

That was a lot of words to say that atheists can be good people.

I don't disagree. I simply don't see how you can't simultaneously be intelligent and believe in God at once. Again, I state that many modern people who clearly have to be at least above average in intelligence to do the work that they do are very religious.

>Pythagoras
>Kant
>Hawking
>Musk

meme list

>John Von Neumann
>a brainlet when compared to a decent indian and a fake nobody
>a brainlet when compared to anyone
you need to see how contemporary mathematicians (contemporary to him) speak about his abilities. he's inhuman.

fuck off to reddit

>says he's a mathematician
>calls euler "you-ler" and not "oiler"

The Ancient Indians knew discovered several mathematical equations about a 1000 years before modern maths.

>Kant
>meme

Darwin

/thread

You seem to have missed the point. "Atheists can't be good people" would be a completely daft claim, and not something I would bother responding so much to.

What I was explaining was that it makes no sense to believe in religion, at least not today. Certainly not any of the most common religions, which have been proven both inconsistent and false long ago, many times over.

And that if someone smart is religious in the typical sense, that is an artifact of their emotional desires and habits, definitely not their intelligence.

However, if you are more concerned about what some authority figure seems to think, than examining arguments to gain some sort of understanding, I don't suppose logical reasoning is much use for you in this debate.

crunge

It's actually pronounced "You-ler" but back in the 18th century, there was a running meme in Basel where they deliberately started pronouncing "Eu" as "Oi" which eventually stuck.

Learn your history, faggot.

Which one?

Which one?

Yes, refer to:

reddit.com/r/The_Bogdanoff/

Steve Jobs probably.

Gibbs is probably one of the most underrated scientists of all time. In a single stroke, he collected, unified, and advanced thermodynamics to near completeness.

Stop being a beta seeking for approval.

>What is the smartest person in recorded history?
Plato