Who was the greatest [scientific] genius of all time? My vote would have to go to Leonard Euler. If you don't know about who he was or the astounding degree to which he contributed to our understanding, by all means read about him. I could never do him justice in any short description. Second choice? Probably DaVinci or Riemann or... wow - that's a tough call I used to think math no fun I couldn't see how it was done Now Euler's my hero For I now see why zero Equals e to the i pi plus one. --Paul Nahin "Euler's Identity" - simple, elegant, and unbelievably rich.
id give it to leonardo da vinci, but not for his discoveries in math and science even though he was basically the godfather to anatomy, but his ability to show genius in anything he tried was unparalleled
I agree. For diversity of genius, he was astounding. Heck - in my op I didn't even mention Newton! It's an impossible call but I'd have to stick with Euler in consideration of both theoretical depth and (especially) breadth, as well as scientific application. But how can one even compare a DaVinci with a Euler? It's impossible. Imagine if someone comes along with the inherent talents of BOTH! Wow!
Norman borlaug. Dude literally saved a massive chunk of the human population on earth, and nobody's ever heard of him. The strains of high-yield grains that we eat were literally created by him. Fuck jesus, Norman Borlaug is our TRUE savior!
Aristotle, of course. He founded a ton of different scientific fields, pretty much came up with the first formal and cohesive idea of empiricism before empiricism was even a thing. Take his work, the Zoology, for example. In it he describes and shows diagrams of his observations and dissections of various animals (which is pretty amazing considering that dissection was frowned upon just a few hundred years ago). In one instance he actually was the first person to discover that fish had air bladders, and he even correctly inferred their purpose. So here's the same guy coming up with the whole idea of biology and taxonomy, and at the same time he's a kind of ancient day Newton who is the first to describe to us what buoyancy is. Before "scientists" we had philosophers. And really all a scientist is, is a philosopher who accepts a particular version of empiricism as an axiomatic premise and uses it to ask him/her self more specific questions. Historians are just the same, philosophers who narrow their work down to asking more specific questions. Which is why it's so funny that the scientists today who happen to not know their own history well enough, like to disparage philosophers. Really, I would say that Aristotle is the greatest genius of all time in general. I mean, he came up with ideas like determinism, made existentialism and science a thing, expanded greatly on Socrates' discovery of fallacies and other types of errors in logic, and a great number of his ideas are still relevant and even considered true today. You'd be surprised how many scientific facts that he found about 2,000 years ago which we still accept today, or how many countries are built on what were originally Aristotelian ideals of ethics and economics. We see Hobbes and Locke formalize ideas like inalienable and intrinsic human rights. But who originally brought up the topic of intrinsic human rights? Aristotle in his commentary on Plato's Theatitus.
Yeah, ummmm... I think that title goes to Aristotle. He was counting the bones in the bodies of fish long before Da Vinci was a thought in his mother's head. Well more than a thousand years before Da Vinci, Aristotle was running around naming hundreds of different plants, discovering that blood and other fluids actually flow through vessels in the human body, naming all of our bones, etc. It was people like Da Vinci that looked back to classical period literature written primarily in Attic and Ionian Greek. Da Vinci rediscovered anatomy.
And the brilliant man who was the first to smoke bud, so far as we know, lived in India around 5,500 B.C. We found him with an incense bull full of partially burnt hashish and found samples on his person and inside his body that tested positive. So not only was he a genius, he was a fucking marvel of a genius, because he didn't bother with anything but concentrates apparently. We actually couldn't be more wrong nowadays when the DEA and other folks say that no one in human history until the last 40 or so years has been smoking weed this potent. People have been smoking hash for over seven thousand years, so we might be a wee bit off on that estimate, uncle Sam.
yea i mean my point was that i would give da vinci the title of greatest genius not only for his anatomical discoveries but for his ability to show genius in anything he tried. im not that familiar with aristotles discoveries in anatomy but i do know that da vincis anatomical diagrams are still being learned from today, his understanding of structure and function rivals and surpasses what we know today.
I certainly don't know about any rivaling or surpassing, but yes he is a huge name in taxonomy and anatomy. Actually more guys who focus on plants look back to his work than anyone else, surprisingly. You usually see people picturing his work on the human body nowadays but his work with trees is actually more relevant today. Did you know that he was the first to draw a correlation between the rings in a tree and it's age? He also named the different basic types of root structures and puzzled over the reason that we see different grain patterns in trees. Really though, he did a lot more work on plant taxonomy than plant anatomy. We still use names that he came up with to identify a lot of plants. Darwin would probably be a bigger name in anatomy, though. He made much bigger leaps and bounds in terms of structure and function. He was kind of the ultimate bird watcher, mainly. That guy had an incredible obsession with birds. Kind of weird, lol.
It's a hard call. There have been a lot through history. Seems the later genius would most certainly benefit and expound upon the works of the geniuses that proceeded him, no? Dr. William Albrecht, in my book. Maybe not a "genius", but certainly the most cognitive observer/experimenter of soil science/chemistry/microbiology. Meh. I'm a big fan of soil. Sam_Spade second.
Aristotle was wrong about most of the things he discovered. He thought the liver was the heart...and all kinds of ass backwards science. And still, he was the brightest one they had in his time.
It is hard to get everything right when you're at square one. I mean, before Aristotle people didn't even know about blood vessels.
Blaise Pascal, leanardo da vinci, galileo,,, albert einstein, nikola tesla, pythagorus,, some orginisation should go around doing iq tests globally and find out whos the actual smartest man/woman on the planet.... I personally think its a woman. Ha
It's such a tomato-tomahto sort of thing. I mean, IQ tests were originally made just for college aptitude testing. But there are all kinds of intelligence. If you were to find the "smartest person on the planet", he/she might be a severely disabled savant that isn't even capable of talking to you. The human mind is a really strange thing. Some folks can literally beat a scientific calculator at computing large, complex equations. Other folks like "rain man" can tell you what was on the newspapers at thus and such of a date, or what's on page 212 of a local yellowbook. So how can we even define intelligence? Did you guys know that even supposedly "dumb" football athletes have an area of their brains that is more developed than the typical person? You see, the reason that birds can navigate to the same place always isn't so much memory or anything super complex. They are actually able to respond to the electromagnetic field of the planet and keep a geometric picture of where they are. And we're starting to think that has to do with things like Barry Sanders having an uncanny natural sense of the positions of other bodies. So say we were to go to another planet without electromagnetism. Our sense of equilibrium and direction would probably suffer. Really interesting stuff, and for many years we heard that it was silly for people to have a "sixth sense". Now it actually makes perfect sense that we would have an electric response to the presence of other bodies, without consciously understanding it, because neuroscientists can readily observe it. So who's to say that someone who has developed this particular function of his/her brain isn't displaying a type of intelligence. Folks would tend to think that intelligence is all cognizant functions, but that's not really the truth as intuition can work on a subconscious level just as much.
While all previous answers have their merit and are undoubtedly incredible minds... I think that I cast my vote for Nikola Tesla. While it's true that others made greater leaps, his work had a more rapid and earth changing effect in his lifetime. Many of the others mentions were of course foundational, but Tesla's work made the what we think of as the modern world possible.
