An example uber genius comparison quote, from TopTens.com “10 Smartest People in History” public rankings (Ѻ) , comparing the genius of Goethe, with Einstein, with Hawking. |
“Shakespeare, Bacon, Newton present an individual element which nothing in their parentage or nationality or locality serves to explain. Why each expended his power in a given way, may in part be made clear, but the source of those original gifts in inscrutable. The word, gifts, indicates this. Genius in any form is not a product to be compounded by the most subtle organic or social chemistry. This assertion does not deny a genetic dependence, but only a complete and exhaustive one. The proper name Milton or Goethe, remains forever the final designation of underived, unweighted combination of powers.”— John Bascom (1876) [5]
“Newton was the greatest creative genius physics has ever seen. None of the other candidates for superlative (Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Feynman) has ever matched Newton’s combined achievements as theoretician, experimentalist, and mathematician.”
— William Cropper (2004), Great Physicists [1]“Isaac Newton ranks with Copernicus and Einstein among principal shapers of our physical worldview. However, whereas we can appreciate Copernicus against the backdrop of Ptolemy, Einstein against the backdrop of Newton, Newton himself may strike the average educated non-scientist as somewhat remarkable.”— Dennis Danielson (2001), The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe From Heraclitus to Hawking (Ѻ)
“Gibbs ranks with men like Newton, Lagrange and Hamilton, who by the sheer force and power of their minds have produced those generalized statements of scientific law which mark epochs in the advance of exact knowledge.”— Frederick Donnan (1924), “The Influence of J. Willard Gibbs on the Science of Physical Chemistry” [2]
“Einstein is a genius in higher physics and ranks with Copernicus, Newton and Kepler.”— William du Bois (1932) (Ѻ)
“Gibbs’ work is the greatest synthetic achievement in science since Newton’s construction of the theory of universal gravitation.”— Boltzmann (c.1900) [18]
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“Few theoretical scientists have had the talent and assurance to do their work in such isolated fashion. Only Einstein—who wrote some of the most important papers before he even laid eyes on another theoretical physicist—may have outdone Gibbs in this respect.”— William Cropper (2004), Great Physicists [1]“Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."— Robert Millikan (c.1920) [4]
“Five: Newton, Bacon, Leibniz, Montesquieu, and myself.”— Buffon (IQ=) when asked how many great men he could name“Of these three the greatest, and one who ranks with Newton and Archimedes, was Karl Friedrich Gauss.”— Morris Kline (1964), Mathematics in Western Culture (Ѻ)“Lagrange's deductions from Newton’s laws were extended by Pierre-Simon Laplace, who ranks with Lagrange and was his contemporary.”— Morris Kline (1985), Mathematics in the Search for Knowledge (Ѻ)“There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these.”— Enrico Fermi (1938)
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