Who are the brightest of the bright?

IQ test designers? No. Robert Redford and his group and his and their mascara? No. The answer: geniuses that existed before creation.

Originally posted by superprivy
Robert Redford and his group and his and their mascara?

Robert Redford?

Mascara?

What exactly are you talking about here?

Peace

At first I thought "here's another one of those 'superprivy' non-sequitur thread starters that will go nowhere". Then it all started to become clear.

privy
n 1: a room equipped with toilet facilities [syn: toilet, lavatory, lav, can, john, bathroom] 2: a small outbuilding with a bench having holes through which a user can defecate [syn: outhouse, earth-closet, jakes]

You're goofing on us. Right?

I'd say it goes in order of top 3

Stephen Hawking
Einstein
Thomas Edison

You can rearrange them how you want.

I would tend to side with Full Metal on this topic and in the exact order of listing. I'm also comfortable in saying that there are more out there that that have been exposed yet. I wonder who is going to be the one for the next generation? Any thoughts?

Well, as far as this question goes I'm still stuck at Robert Redford and their mascara.

How 'bout Robert Oppenheimer? Carl Sagan?

Peace

Good list Full Metal, but you forgot one (in my opinion at least): Nikola Tesla.

All good picks. When we use the term "bright" are we, however, referring necessarily to individuals who are bright only in terms of mathematics or science? I submit as two of my entries William Shakespeare and Ludwig Van Beethoven. To me, these two guys are simply brilliant and represent some of the best Humanity has to offer. Of course, they can't crunch the numbers like Hawking or Einstein, but they created works that have survived centuries and which are held amongst the most beautiful of Man's accomplishments.

Oh, and Tesla was a great one.

[edit on 14/10/05 by Jeremiah25]

I agree with your premise about Ludwig van Beethoven and William Shakespeare. People like these two have provided us with lasting food and rest for the soul. A product to last far longer than a sound bite in the ozone mist. Timeless. There are many more in this category but what you have is sufficient for starters. They have provided us with much needed shelter from the fast food lane.
This is where I go to get away from the hustle and bustle of the fast lane provided by people like Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Edison et al.

Well done Jeremiah.

Thanks,
Orangetom

Originally posted by Full Metal
Stephen Hawking

What has he ever done?
Anti-gravity? Inter-dimentional travel? bending light? anything like that?

Because I'm not aware of it.

I'd say two people who are equal smartest scientists of all time.
Einstein and Tesla.

Can you really single out one individual that is the MOST INTELLIGENT?
No, some of the brightest people in our society have not contributed anything to the extent of other "bright" people, even though the potential is there. Does that make those individuals less "bright"? No, it means their achievement level was lower. You must also realize that some of the "brightest" people on earth are still yet to be born, so don't count them out either. I think the best direction this thread should take, rather than who is the brightest, it should be what has these bright people contributed to our society as a whole, and how it has effected you as a person.

[edit on 113131p://666 by LiquidationOfDiscrepancy]

Um, Leonardo DaVinci anyone? Artist, inventor. WAY ahead of his time.

Look up a person by the name of William James Sidis, many believe he never lived up to his potential.

[edit on 053131p://000 by LiquidationOfDiscrepancy]

Everybody forgot BENJAMIN FRANKLIN!!!

He was intelligent,an inventor,and...........great with the ladies!!!!

Can you name the brightest person of all time? Perhaps Albert Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. Maybe Isaac Newton or John Stuart Mill. These notables are certainly contenders, but there was one man who may have outshone them all. You have probably never heard of William James Sidis.

At six William was able to calculate on what day of the week any date would fall. One reporter was amazed to discover that he could not only quote facts from books, but also give the numbers of the pages on which those facts could be verified. He enjoyed star-gazing and map-making, and began collecting 'streetcar transfers', a hobby which became a life-long obsession and on which he later wrote what may be the most boring book ever written.

He sped through grade school, completing all seven grades in seven months, though he was not so good at maths to begin with. He took an interest at seven and even developed a set of logarithms in base twelve. He devised his own speed-reading system, wrote four books between the ages of six and eight and invented a new Esperanto-like language. By the time he was eight William had passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy examination and the entrance exam for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In high school he took six weeks to complete the four year curriculum and then worked for another six weeks as a teaching assistant. Before officially studying physics he was helping senior students with their assignments.

Withdrawn from the high school after three months William stayed at home mastering advanced mathematics. He read Einstein and may have corresponded with the great man. At eleven he enrolled as a 'special student' at Harvard and at twelve delivered a lecture on 'four-dimensional bodies' to the Harvard Mathematical Club. By now the press was onto him and reported a severe bout of flu as a nervous breakdown. His interests were wide and included politics, mathematics, languages, astronomy, anatomy and transport systems. He wrote a political constitution for a utopian society and ordered his personal life with a set of 154 rules, which included celibacy.

A cousin said of him that he never played games but was always reading. He was "a genius, and to be a genius you have to do a lot of work". This seriousness and brilliance, together with social ineptitude, led to persecution at Harvard, bolstered by strong anti-semitic feeling. His grades were not brilliant and he graduated 'cum laude' rather than 'magna cum laude', thus incurring the wrath of his mother.

In 1915 he secured a position as professor of mathematics at the Rice Institute where he was surrounded by brilliant minds. He was teased and reduced to ineffectiveness by students older than him and increasingly became a social misfit. He joined the socialist party, strongly expressed pacifist views and was asked to leave after eight months.

www.daveslater.telinco.co.uk...

William James Sidis (April 1, 1898–July 17, 1944) was an eccentric genius and child prodigy, famous in the United States of America in the early 20th century but now virtually unknown.

Sidis was born to Jewish Russian immigrant parents, Boris Sidis and Sarah Sidis neé Mandelbaum. Boris emigrated in 1887 to escape political prosecution for breaking the Czarist laws against teaching peasants to read, while Sarah's family fled the pogroms about 1889. William's parents were considered geniuses in their own right. Boris Sidis taught psychology at Harvard University, treated patients as a psychologist and psychiatrist, and wrote many books. Sarah was a medical doctor who had received no formal education before medical school, except for tutoring by Boris. She gave up her own medical career to assist in William's education. William was named for a friend and colleague of Boris, William James.

Billy's parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, as opposed to disciplinary punishment, an outrageous idea in the early 20th century for which they received much criticism. However, consequently young William could read at 18 months (hyperlexia), taught himself Latin at 2, Greek at 3, had written a treatise on anatomy at 4, wrote four books and knew eight languages (English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, French, German and Vendergood, his own invention) before his eighth birthday, and had given a lecture on four dimensional bodies to an entire auditorium of mathematicians at Harvard at the age of 11. He was said to eventually become the foremost mathematician of the 20th century. His IQ was estimated at between 250 and 300 by psychometrician Abraham Sterling, and he entered Harvard at the age of 11 as a special student in a program designed to enroll gifted young individuals early. The university had refused to let him apply at age eight. He was the youngest and most prominent of this amazing group of prodigies who studied at Harvard in 1909, which included Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, Richard Buckminster Fuller and composer Roger Sessions.

en.wikipedia.org...

This is proof that not all geniuses live up to their potential.

For a time he worked as a laboratory assistant but resigned in disgust upon discovering that he was working to a military agenda. He was imprisoned for being prominent in a protest march that turned into a riot and was rescued from eighteen months hard-labour by his father. William later considered this redemption to be an 'abduction'.

In 1925 his book 'The Animate and the Inanimate' was published. This was a scientific work in which William predicted black holes years before anyone else. The work was totally ignored and William never again published a book in his own name.


'Escaping' from his parents he worked first as a Russian interpreter and then in a number of positions operating adding machines for low wages. Always he hid his genius from his employer and left when it was discovered. The press continued to hound him and he objected to those who felt that he owed them a debt just because he was a genius. His isolation and eccentricity increased.

His high intelligence cannot be doubted. To give one last example, he was fond of completing crosswords without writing the answers down until he had them all. Abraham Sterling, director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, said that "he easily had an I.Q. between 250 and 300. I have never heard of the existence of anybody with such an I.Q. I would honestly say that he was the most prodigious intellect of our entire generation".

At the age of 46 William James Sidis, possibly the world's greatest mind ever, suffered a serious stroke and died. History hardly remembers him.

What went wrong? Why did this monster mind apparently achieve so little? The potential was there. Reading through the details of William's life (in Amy Wallace's book, 'The Prodigy', published by Macmillan) a few things become very clear. William was a reluctant genius. In his early years he delighted in his gifts and abilities, but he lived in a goldfish bowl with the world watching his every move. His father made the serious mistake of setting him on a pedestal as an example of how children should be educated, attributing his high I.Q. to education. The critics were there, many just waiting for him to fail. The press love to find fault with those in the public eye; it sells newspapers. Princess Diana was a recent victim of the tyranny of the press, but she was not the first and will not be the last. William Sidis was denied privacy and the freedom to live his life in the way he wanted and withdrew into his shell. The world was thus denied the potentially huge benefits of a very powerful mind.

But does society have the right to say to the individual "You must perform for us"? William Sidis did his own thing. He used his great mind in his esoteric streetcar transfer hobby and in the writing of a revisionist history of the American people. We do not tell artists that they must decorate public buildings so that everyone can benefit from their talents. Nor do we expect composers to dedicate themselves to the most popular styles so that the greatest number of people will enjoy their work. Genius does not work like that. In fact, genius may be smothered if we attempt to harness and steer it in a desirable direction. At an individual level most people have experienced 'moments of brilliance' when they have least expected them. In fact, the harder we try to be clever the less likely we are to excel. Brilliance is not available on prescription.

Should we leave our best minds to develop without intervention? Probably not. Very few of intellectual history's great minds have arrived at greatness without active encouragement and even some pushing. But it is the height of arrogance to believe that we can produce genius to order. We should be there for the great minds when they need our support, pushing them oh so gently. And we must protect them from the awful pressures that genius can incur. Of utmost importance, we must remember that the mind belongs to the individual and not to society (and certainly not to parents and teachers). There is the risk that our efforts will be in vain, but the risk of suffocating a great mind may be far greater.

Dave Slater

www.daveslater.telinco.co.uk...

[edit on 063131p://000 by LiquidationOfDiscrepancy]

Bump.

This is a very interesting thread.

What are the basics of Vendergood, the language invented by William James Sidis?

Answer


(Answer last edited on May 30, 05)
Vendergood was invented by William James Sidis when he was in pre-school. It's based on Latin. It's allegedly simpler than Esperanto. Existing only in outline form, Vendergood has a base-12 system of numbers.

There is a book called "The prodigy: A biography of William James Sidis, America's greatest child prodigy" [New York: E. P. Dutton, by Wallace, A. (1986)], that contains examples of the Vendergood language.

[ESPERANTO: Language created by Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887. The foundation blocks are: The alphabet consists of 28 letters, each of which has one sound. Six standard accented letters exist: c, g, h, j, s, u. Stress falls on the penultimate syllable of each word. Verbs do not decline for number of person. Number or persons are indicated by accompanying pronouns. Verb endings indicate function or tense. Nouns end in -o. Adverbs end in -e. Adjectives end in -a. Suffixes are attached to root words only.]

[BASE-12 SYSTEM OF NUMBERS: The simplest description is that, just as when we count by tens there is repetition once we get to a number evenly divisible by ten (20-21-22...30-31-32...40-41-42...etc.), in base-12, the repetition starts at 12, then 24, then 36, etc.

Instead of counting 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10,
we would count 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-#-%-@
(with # arbitrarily representing ten, % representing 11, and @ representing 12).

Counting by tens, the next number after 10 is 11 (10 +1).
Counting by twelves, the next number after @ would be @1 (12 + 1).

@1 (= 13 in base-10)
@2 (= 14)
@3 (= 15)
@4 (= 16)
@5 (= 17)
@6 (= 18)
@7 (= 19)
@8 (= 20)
@9 (= 21)
@# (= 22)
@% (= 23)
and finally
2@ (= 24)

Next would be
2@1 (= 25)
2@2 (= 26)
etc.

You COULD write "2@" as "@@" -- but once you get up into the higher numbers, you'd eventually have to create some shorthand symbols, rather than having a long string of "@"s. I just arbitrarily chose "2@."

Counting by tens (i.e., in base-10), you have 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.

Counting by twelves (i.e., in base-12), you have
0 (= 0 in base-10)
@ (= 12)
2@ (= 24)
3@ (= 36)
4@ (= 48)
5@ (= 60)
6@ (= 72)
7@ (= 84)
8@ (= 96)
9@ (= 108)
#@ (= 120)
%@ (= 132)
* (= 144)

After that you begin the next cycle, counting to the next landmark -- twenty-four 12's: *@1, *@2, *@3, etc.

I used " * " to represent twelve 12's. Why not "@@"?

Because you need a simple way to write larger numbers. Imagine getting up to the 10th multiple of 144 and writing it like this: @@@@@@@@@@. It's too hard to count all the @'s with a quick glance. But you can easily understand 10* if you glance at it.

www.answerbag.com...

You probably never heard of them, whoever "the brightest of the bright," happen to be.

Who we know are those who publicized their names, and published with their names with officially signed contracts, patents, and so forth. The actual brightest probably avoid the glare of publicity insofaras possible, but produce things you read about every day.

In more recent history, it is highly unlikely that any people cited such as Edison (who stole inventions from Tesla) or Einstein (whose works were largely the product of his lady friend or wife at the time) or even Hawking, are entirely as bright as we think.

Just as in being a rock star, being "brilliant," has largely to do with many levels of political correctness that pervade our social structure. Sure Edison invented things however he had also many assistants who were not credited. Einstein may well have just been a game player, and not so "brilliant," until powers that be promoted him. Hawking may well so be a story of promotion.

It is possible that the most brilliant people work behind closed doors, say in this genre of speaking, at Area 51, and discovered how to fine tune technology to escape the Galaxy through diligent inventions.

Even the physicists who invented the atomic bomb were useless compared to the mechanic kind of person who invented the switching devices. No one calls him brilliant, but he made it happen, something very very brilliant of its nature, an atomic explosion.

[edit on 23-10-2005 by SkipShipman]

Originally posted by SkipShipman
You probably never heard of them, whoever "the brightest of the bright," happen to be.

Who we know are those who publicized their names, and published with their names with officially signed contracts, patents, and so forth. The actual brightest probably avoid the glare of publicity insofaras possible, but produce things you read about every day.

In more recent history, it is highly unlikely that any people cited such as Edison (who stole inventions from Tesla) or Einstein (whose works were largely the product of his lady friend or wife at the time) or even Hawking, are entirely as bright as we think.

Just as in being a rock star, being "brilliant," has largely to do with many levels of political correctness that pervade our social structure. Sure Edison invented things however he had also many assistants who were not credited. Einstein may well have just been a game player, and not so "brilliant," until powers that be promoted him. Hawking may well so be a story of promotion.

It is possible that the most brilliant people work behind closed doors, say in this genre of speaking, at Area 51, and discovered how to fine tune technology to escape the Galaxy through diligent inventions.

Even the physicists who invented the atomic bomb were useless compared to the mechanic kind of person who invented the switching devices. No one calls him brilliant, but he made it happen, something very very brilliant of its nature, an atomic explosion.

[edit on 23-10-2005 by SkipShipman]

Haha, you are right about the brilliant guy behind closed doors working day in and day out on something we'll never hear of for at least 50 years.

The humble soul that makes the world go around. Truly remarkable people indeed.

Originally posted by intrepid
Um, Leonardo DaVinci anyone? Artist, inventor. WAY ahead of his time.

I think DaVinci was most definitely one of the brightest of the bright but there are almost too many to count IMO.