I must be honest with you: I was trying to come up with an idea for a new story and "the most intelligent people in the world" seemed decent enough. So I started to read various lists of very intelligent people, found some interesting stories, felt a little ashamed I've never heard of most of them.
After going through several articles, it got a bit boring - all these guys boasting incredible IQ's are either mathematicians, physicists or astrophysicists. I seems totally unfair to me that we define the smartest people on Earth by their ability to solve complex mathematical problems. What about the rest of the world? If you don't understand Fermat's last theorem are you totally dumb?
I so much wanted to write a whole post on this subject, which I thought should start with the very definition of intelligence.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, intelligence is:
- (1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason
- (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
There you have it, intelligence is to be measured by objective criteria, such as IQ tests. Fair enough, I guess, if you want to create a Top 10 list. But still... life is more than maths and I'm sure there are lots of very smart and creative people in this world (like my kids, for instance! ☺️) that do not get the recognition they probably deserve.
I somehow feel that this whole business of admiring people that are good at maths has a lot to do with childhood trauma and the nightmare of doing math homework.
(No, I don't have any trauma involving math, or physics, for that matter. It was early in my high-school years that I decided that stuff was not for me and never really bothered with it again.)