Who is the smartest person who ever lived?
It’s an interesting question and I have no criteria for how to pick the #1, but these 5 should definitely be in the top 10.
Sir Issac Newton – Invented Calculus and showed us how ordered the universe was.
Albert Einstein – Changed the way we perceive the universe with general relativity.
Aristotle – The basis of modern reasoning (I picked him out of thin air over Plato and Socrates).
William Shakespeare – He’s probably remembered more because his art is able to last and is more accessible, but his plays are still the literary peak of mankind, over and over again.
Leonardo Da Vinci – The renaissance man of the renaissance. He could have lived to be 500 and still not lived up to his potential.
Anyone else I’m missing? My original list had Thomas Edison, Alan Turing, and Jon von Neumann, but that’s because I’m biased towards the mathmeticians who laid the groundwork for modern computers.
If I had to pick a #1, I’d probably go with Newton.
Update: mike made the suggestion to put Mozart or Beethoven on the list and I agree.