Greatest Minds of the World that Changed our Way Of Living And Thinking

Anybody that uses IQ numbers as anything other than a very rough proxy for intelligence, and/or attempts to estimate past figures IQs is either naive, disingenuous or both, and often times is trying to sell you a discount IQ test. FWIW, Serious IQ tests don’t go to 230. There’s only so fast you can solve puzzle patterns.

It is very difficult to suggest the most intelligent person to ever live because there have been so many people with remarkable intelligence skills in different fields like Shakespeare, Leonardo da vinci, Tesla, Einstein, newton, Turing, Mozart, Von Neumann and many more. So to announce one person as the best would be injustice to the others. Here’s some of the greatest mind that reshaped the way of thinking and living of human being.

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla is an under-rated and forgotten genius. Einstein was amazingly intelligent but he was assisted by his very intelligent wife and and an assistant. Nikola Tesla was a complete lone wolf. He had a great memory, amazing visualization, and was years ahead of his time. He invented the modern world as we know it with an amazing 700 patents. He was an amazingly open-minded mind. Many great scientist think he is the greatest genius ever. He probably could have single handily destroyed the world. Amazing man!

Nikola Tesla was a prodigy. He could visualize his inventions mentally. His work was also far ahead of his age. He deserves to be in first place. He invented the alternating current known as ac-current which is still powering our home on the planet.This led the industrial revolution. Idea of radio, radar was invented by Nikola Tesla.

He build the first hydro electric plant at Niagara and proved to the world that this type of power was a practical energy source.Cryogenic engineering make transistor that makes information age possible. Tesla was experimenting with cryogenic engineering.He was the first person to record the waves from outer space. He also discovered the resonant frequency of the planet. Remote control,Neon lighting,Modern electric motor,wireless communication are some of his great invention for the 20th and 21st century.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor’s degree.

Albert Einstein had a passion for inquiry that eventually led him to develop the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect and immigrated to the U.S. in the following decade after being targeted by the Nazis. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century, with his work also having a major impact on the development of atomic energy. With a focus on unified field theory during his later years, Einstein died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Leonardo Da Vinci

He was centuries ahead of his time. CENTURIES. Not decades. He is the first to research the mechanics of human anatomy. And the way he presented his knowledge of it wasn’t possible for us until we got the technology several decades ago. He correctly theorized geographic time while everyone else still believed in the Great Flood. And not only was he a genius in science but also in engineering and art. He is the definition of genius. Yes Einstein was amazing. But remember the Vinci had none of the technology or schooling of modern times. All he had, was an unquenchable curiosity for EVERYTHING.

Leonardo da Vinci was an italian polymath: a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the renaissance man, a man of ” unquenchable curiosity ” and “feverishly inventive imagination”.

Two of his works , the Mona Lisa and the last supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time.

Leonardo drew the plans for the first armoured car in 1485. He invented the bicycle 300 years before it appeared on the road. Da Vinci created an inflatable tube so people could float on the water.

He dug into graveyards at night to steal corpses and study human anatomy.
He produced aerial maps for Cesare Borgia which are still accurate today. He is considered by many as the father of modern science. He was one of the acclaimed artist of the renaissance.

Leonardo sketched the first parachute, first helicopter, first aeroplane, first tank, first repeating rifle, swinging bridge, paddle boat, and the first motorcar.

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Leonardo was very much interested in the possibility of human flight.He produced many studies of the flight of birds and plans for several flying machines.

He made maps of europe. He invented hydraulic pumps. He designed a movable bridge for the Duke of Milan. He was famous for the way he used light in his portraits.

He established modern techniques of scientific illustration with highly accurate renderings such as ‘Embryo in the Womb’.

He was a vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.

Isaac Newton

He hit his head with an apple and he became one of the smartest men known – M+242

He single handedly invented calculus, one of the most important tools in mathematics, and composed a model of the universe that we still use today to make predictions about how things should work – M+124

Knowledge is man’s greatest treasure, and this man greatly expanded human knowledge and has paved the way for so many others, including so many side disciplines. Other geniuses such as Planck, Einstein and Bohr have built their theories upon the foundation that Newton laid in centuries ago. It is unimaginable to think how much he’s accomplished in the first quarter-century of his life. Leonardo the Vinci is his close second.

He was one of, if not, the most intellectual scientist that this world ever known! Yet, no one really had an idea until he died. Not, to mention the pressure he had from extremists and dictators in Britain that time, which forced many of his great discoveries to remain hidden and out of public reach, whereas some still until today!

John Von Neumann

John von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician, synthesizer, and promoter of the stored program concept, whose logical design of the IAS became the prototype of most of its successors – the von Neumann Architecture.

He was born Neumann Janos on December 28, 1903, in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

At a very young age, von Neumann was interested in math, the nature of numbers and the logic of the world around him. Even at age six, when his mother once stared aimlessly in front of her, he asked, “What are you calculating?” thus displaying his natural affinity for numbers. When only six years old he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head. However, even at that young age, he had a wide range of interests. At age eight he became fascinated by history and read all forty-four volumes of the universal history, which resided in the family’s library.

His parents encouraged him in every interest, but were careful not to push their young son, as many parents are apt to do when they find they have a genius for a child. This allowed von Neumann to develop not only a powerful intellect but what many people considered a likable personality as well.

He received his early education in Budapest, under the tutelage of M. Fekete, with whom he published his first paper at the age of 18. Entering the University of Budapest in 1921, he studied Chemistry, moving his base of studies to both Berlin and Zurich before receiving his diploma in 1925 in Chemical Engineering. He returned to his first love of mathematics in completing his doctoral degree in 1928.

von Neumann was invited to visit Princeton University in 1930, and when the Institute for Advanced Studies was founded there in 1933, he was appointed to be one of the original six Professors of Mathematics, a position which he retained for the remainder of his life. At the instigation and sponsorship of Oskar Morganstern, von Neumann became a US citizen in time for clearance for wartime work.

Near the end of 1929 married Mariette Kovesi, whom he had known since his early childhood. They had a daughter, Marina, in 1935. Von Neumann was affectionate with his new daughter, but did not contribute to the care of her or to the housework, which he considered to be the job of the wife. The gap between the lively 26-year-old Mariette and the respectable 31-year-old John von Neumann began to increase and in 1936 they broke up, Mariette returning home to Budapest. Soon after, on a trip to Budapest, he met Klari Dan and they were married in 1938.

Von Neumann’s interest in computers differed from that of his peers by his quickly perceiving the application of computers to applied mathematics for specific problems, rather than their mere application to the development of tables. During the war, von Neumann’s expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects. This work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation. His his first exposure to a computer was with Howard Aiken’s Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator.

His correspondence in 1944 shows his interest with the work of not only Aiken but also the electromechanical relay computers of George Stibitz, and the work by Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University. By the latter years of World War II von Neumann was playing the part of an executive management consultant, serving on several national committees, applying his amazing ability to rapidly see through problems to their solutions. Through this means he was also a conduit between groups of scientists who were otherwise shielded from each other by the requirements of secrecy. He brought together the needs of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and the Manhattan Project) with the capabilities of firstly the engineers at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later his own work on building the IAS machine. Several “supercomputers” were built by National Laboratories as copies of his machine.

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Postwar von Neumann concentrated on the development of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) computer and its copies around the world. His work with the Los Alamos group continued and he continued to develop the synergism between computers capabilities and the needs for computational solutions to nuclear problems related to the hydrogen bomb.

von Neumann worked as long as he possibly could after being diagnosed with cancer. He attended ceremonies held in his honor using a wheelchair, and tried to keep up appearances with his family and friends. Though he had accomplished so much in his years he could not accept death, could not consider a world that existed without his mind constantly thinking and solving. He died on February 8, 1957, 18 months after he was diagnosed with cancer.

Stephen Hawking

I do not dispute that Newton and Einstein are undoubtedly the science giants and Shakespeare the art giant. But I have to vote for Hawking, and let me explain why.

Stephen Hawking is admired by many, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Let’s start off with what he was originally known for: his research in relativity in the late 1970’s. Using the results of Einstein, he used sophisticated mathematical methods with Penrose to show that singularities are not mathematical artifacts, but in fact are real and generic. That is, black holes are real, and he concluded this well before the identification of Cygnus X-1.

In 1974, Hawking sent shock waves throughout the physics world with his achievement that black holes radiate. The result provided mankind’s first glimpse ever of uniting quantum theory with general relativity, which before this time seemed irreconcilable; it has also set the direction for theoretical physics ever since.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

German mathematician who is sometimes called the “prince of mathematics.” He was a prodigious child, at the age of three informing his father of an arithmetical error in a complicated payroll calculation and stating the correct answer. In school, when his teacher gave the problem of summing the integers from 1 to 100 (an arithmetic series ) to his students to keep them busy, Gauss immediately wrote down the correct answer 5050 on his slate. At age 19, Gauss demonstrated a method for constructing a heptadecagon using only a straightedge and compass which had eluded the Greeks. (The explicit construction of the heptadecagon was accomplished around 1800 by Erchinger.) Gauss also showed that only regular polygons of a certain number of sides could be in that manner (a heptagon, for example, could not be constructed.)

Gauss proved the fundamental theorem of algebra, which states that every polynomial has a root of the form a+bi. In fact, he gave four different proofs, the first of which appeared in his dissertation. In 1801, he proved the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which states that every natural number can be represented as the product ofprimes in only one way.

At age 24, Gauss published one of the most brilliant achievements in mathematics, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801). In it, Gauss systematized the study of number theory (properties of the integers ). Gauss proved that every number is the sum of at most three triangular numbers and developed the algebra of congruences.

In 1801, Gauss developed the method of least squares fitting, 10 years before Legendre, but did not publish it. The method enabled him to calculate the orbit of the asteroid Ceres, which had been discovered by Piazzi from only three observations. However, after his independent discovery, Legendre accused Gauss of plagiarism. Gauss published his monumental treatise on celestial mechanics Theoria Motus in 1806. He became interested in the compass through surveying and developed the magnetometer and, with Wilhelm Weber measured the intensity of magnetic forces. With Weber, he also built the first successful telegraph.

Gauss is reported to have said “There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton and Eisenstein” (Boyer 1968, p. 553). Most historians are puzzled by the inclusion of Eisenstein in the same class as the other two. There is also a story that in 1807 he was interrupted in the middle of a problem and told that his wife was dying. He is purported to have said, “Tell her to wait a moment ’til I’m through” (Asimov 1972, p. 280).

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Gauss arrived at important results on the parallel postulate, but failed to publish them. Credit for the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry therefore went to Janos Bolyai and Lobachevsky. However, he did publish his seminal work on differential geometry in Disquisitiones circa superticies curvas. The Gaussian curvature (or “second” curvature) is named for him. He also discovered the Cauchy integral theorem

for analytic functions, but did not publish it. Gauss solved the general problem of making a conformal map of one surface onto another.

Unfortunately for mathematics, Gauss reworked and improved papers incessantly, therefore publishing only a fraction of his work, in keeping with his motto “pauca sed matura” (few but ripe). Many of his results were subsequently repeated by others, since his terse diary remained unpublished for years after his death. This diary was only 19 pages long, but later confirmed his priority on many results he had not published. Gauss wanted a heptadecagon placed on his gravestone, but the carver refused, saying it would be indistinguishable from a circle. The heptadecagon appears, however, as the shape of a pedestal with a statue erected in his honor in his home town of Braunschweig.

Archimedes

Archimedes was born in the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 287 BC. He was the son of an astronomer and mathematician named Phidias. Aside from that, very little is known about the early life of Archimedes or his family. Some maintain that he belonged to the nobility of Syracuse, and that his family was in some way related to that of Hiero II, King of Syracuse.

In the third century BC, Syracuse was a hub of commerce, art and science. As a youth in Syracuse Archimedes developed his natural curiosity and penchant for problem solving. When he had learned as much as he could from his teachers, Archimedes traveled to Egypt in order to study in Alexandria. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, Alexandria had, by Archimedes’ time, earned a reputation for great learning and scholarship.

Archimedes returned to Syracuse and pursued a life of thought and invention. Many apocryphal legends record how Archimedes endeared himself to King Hiero II, discovering solutions to problems that vexed the king.

ARCHIMEDES’ SCREW

One such story recounts how a perplexed King Hiero was unable to empty rainwater from the hull of one of his ships. The King called upon Archimedes for assistance. Archimedes’ solution was to create a machine consisting of a hollow tube containing a spiral that could be turned by a handle at one end. When the lower end of the tube was placed into the hull and the handle turned, water was carried up the tube and out of the boat. The Archimedes Screw is still used as a method of irrigation in developing countries.

ARCHIMEDES’ LEGACY

Despite the many fantastic tales surrounding the life of Archimedes, we are most indebted to him for his mathematical treatises and the contributions he made to the understanding of fundamental physical phenomena. Through the medium of geometry, he was able to elucidate the principles for such basic devices as the pulley, the fulcrum and the lever – devices still utilized today. Archimedes is also credited with the discovery of the principle of buoyancy, or the power of a fluid to exert an upward force on a body placed in it. His further research into volume and density was fundamental to the development of theories of hydrostatics-the branch of physics dealing with liquids at rest.

The story of the survival of Archimedes’ treatises down to our own time is intricate and complicated, and has been traced in extraordinary detail. But an essential point is this: it is through three manuscripts that we know the texts of Archimedes treatises in Greek. One was last heard of in 1311, a second was last heard of in the 1550s, and the third is The Archimedes Palimpsest, now at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and the subject of this website. Because this is just the start of a fascinating story.

There are other great minds. And some of the names are as follows: