The worlds most intelligent person?

Question

i recently read that stephen hawking is officially the most intelligent person in the world( a remarkable achievment given his disability), but who decides this and how, and would you agree and if not who would you nominate and why

Answer 1

the answer from that one i think is Albert Einstein.

Answer 2

hey, a lot of people are really smart...

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" etc... and he was one of the greatest detective before.

Albert Einstein discovered a lot of theories without using any experiment tools and stuff, so wouldn't anyone think it's neat?

The Couple Pierre and Marie Curie contributed a lot in the periodic table, so they could be big time geniuses themselves...

Bill Gates never graduated, but indeed he made what we're using right now, correct?

who knows? maybe someone might keep on dominating that role, and hopefully, he/she would be of much use to the whole world

Answer 3

his IQ was 165 in college, he is not the smartest person in the world by far.

It's decided by simply looking at IQ's.

I can't nominate someone without knowing their IQ.

It's generally considered to be Marilyn Vos Savant or something

Answer 4

Hawking is well-known to the public, but I read once about a survey of whom other physicists think highly of, and he didn't even rate. Lot of other highly intelligent people come to mind, both alive and dead; Richard Feyman, Edward Witten, Paul Dirac and Alan Guth among others.

I agree that there is no way to rate who the most intelligent person in the world is, and it's usually a popularity contest, so basically meaningless.

I would rank Einstein above Hawking, because as smart as Hawking is, even his groundbreaking work on Black Holes doesn't come close to the achievement of Relativity.

Answer 5

Albert Eistine for his laws on relativity  

Answer 6

I don't think its really fair to call anyone the "most intelligent person" because many highly intelligent people are only smart when it comes to that subject. Stephan Hawking is my idol, and I think he is very, very intelligent, but he probably doesn't know the first thing when it comes to installing an engine. People that excel seem to excel in one category. Take me for example. I love science and mathematics, but I couldn't write a good poem or a good short story to save my life! It doesn't mean I'm not intelligent, it just means I'm not intelligent in those subjects. Stephan Hawking is brilliant, don't get me wrong, but it is impossible to have on person know the most about everything because that person simply doesn't exist.

As for who decides, that I'm not sure about. I think that there are people that hold their own contests, but I don't think there is any official competition.

But if I had to nominate one person for the greatest thinker in science of our time, it would have to be Stephan Hawking.

Answer 7

I think Nikola Tesla and Thomas A. Edison, were pretty smart cookies, then again Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking are some of the sharper tools on the shed.

Answer 8

Stephen Hawking is not the most intelligent, although thats what he would like to believe. There are just so many geniuses that people dont know of, that were so great, but I do believe Marilyn Savant or whatever her name is, has an IQ of 200 something, 220 I think. However, who is to say we have correctly measured IQ. There have been countless geniuses in the last 300 years that we have never even heard of, people like Oliver Heaviside, Ted Kaczynski, Francis Galton, Jeremy Bentham, Henry Cavendish, Nikola Tesla, Geoffrey Pyke and many more. Tesla was such a genius and he died in a hotel flat broke, societies have a tendency to strip the lives of geniuses with their own social ignorance, politics and economics. Society has always rejected genius for their anti-social and awkward ways, its like ignorance prevails all over the world, as those who are genius are considered  idiots and those who are idiots are considered intelligent. I would say arrogance is ignorance, because only arrogance would explain somebody believing they are intelligent, when really they have nothing to show for it.

Look around today, go out and ask people, write up a survey, ask people if they are intelligent, I bet you that at least 85% will say they are intlligent, and when asked why they say because "i can learn", just look at that logic and tell me, does that make someones intelligent. Smart and intelligence are two different things, knowledge is what defines smart, intelligence is defined by logic and intuition that is simply genius and out of the ordinary.

For driving the future, and theorizing about so many things that we havnt even heard of today, I would say Nikola Tesla was a genius, the greatest I am not sure, but his accomplishments have literally reached the universe.

Answer 9

I don't know who the most intelligent person alive is, but the smartest person to have ever lived and his IQ to be ever recorded was William James Sidis.

He lived for a mere 42 yrs and had an IQ somewhere between 250 & 300.

Answer 10

I was told , by a very smart professor, that the measure of intelligence is not  how much you know, or those numbers.... it is a measure of HOW one thinks.....which is why, I believe, those who think 'outside the box' are those who get the farthest ahead..... and Mr. Hawking has a distinct advantage over us.... his body has been defeated by his disease, but  his mind is untouched by it........ his mind then, doesn't have to put up with all the information that his body ISN"T sending up for processing constantly,  and thus has more time and energy to think over whatever new thoughts that Mr. Hawking has today!!....  

I would choose him as one of the top ten, surely.... but there's none that I would actively put in that top spot....like another poster noted, we seem to be good at ONE thing... very few are good at everything....

Answer 11

I think this is decided by a group of Mensa. However, it is highly subjective, because they may not consider some factors that are really important, and consider others that are unimportant.

IQ is based on a series of fixed questions. What if they don't ask many of the questions to which the person knows the answer? The whole result would be seriously skewed.

Hawking has done great things, no doubt. But his field of accomplishment is rather limited. He is a nuclear physicist. What about his ability to repair an automobile? What does he know about electronics?