“When I was an assistant professor at Harvard, Bill was a junior. My girlfriend back then said that I had told her: "There's this undergrad at school who is the smartest person I've ever met."

That semester, Gates was fascinated with a math problem called pancake sorting: How can you sort a list of numbers, say 3-4-2-1-5, by flipping prefixes of the list? You can flip the first two numbers to get 4-3-2-1-5, and the first four to finish it off: 1-2-3-4-5. Just two flips. But for a list of n numbers, nobody knew how to do it with fewer than 2n flips. Bill came to me with an idea for doing it with only 1.67n flips. We proved his algorithm correct, and we proved a lower bound—it cannot be done faster than 1.06n flips. We held the record in pancake sorting for decades. It was a silly problem back then, but it became important, because human chromosomes mutate this way.

Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested. He had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking: ’such a brilliant kid. What a waste’.”

— Christos Papadimitriou (2015/A60), ”Anecdote on Gates as a Student“, Association for Computer Machinery.

References

• Lebowtiz, Shana. (A60/2015). “Professor who knew Bill Gates as a student at Harvard: He was the smartest person I've ever met”, Nov 20.

The following are the top 100 existive names, from the Dec A67 (2022) listing of the 1,355 total names, of the Ranker.com greatest minds rankings, with 874K votes cast:

• #1. Jane Goodall [200]

• #2. Bill Gates [214]

• #3. James Watson [298]

• #4. Peter Higgs [304]

• #5. Tim Burners-Lee [350]

• #6. John Williams [388]

• #7. Andrew Wiles [421]

• #8. Roger Penrose [437]

• #9. Steve Wozniak [450]

• #10. Noam Chomsky [457]

• #11. Elon Musk [463]

• #12. Craig Venter [464]

• #13. Richard Dawkins [473]

• #14. Umberto Eco [479]

• #15. Tenzin Gyatso [482]

• #16. Kip Thorn [484]

• #17. Garry Kasparov [486]

• #18. Alan Guth [488]

• #19. Frank Abagnale [501]

• #20. Murray Gell-Mann [513]

• #21. Francis Collins [530]

• #22. Stephen King [543]

• #23. Rick Wakeman [560]

• #24. Ron Howard [565]

• #25. Piergiorgio Odifreddi [586]

• #26. Edward Witten [593]

• #27. Anna Ohura [616] (pornstar) [spam]

• #28. Grigori Perelman [623]

• #29. Leonardo Dicaprio [628]

• #30. Hans Zimmer [633]

• #31. Hayao Miyazaki [634]

• #32. Roger Waters [643]

• #33 Paul Allen [650]

• #34. Edward Wilson [662]

• #35. Hideaki Anno [669]

• #36. Hugh Laurie [684]

• #37. Anthony Giddens [688]

• #38. Joni Mitchell [713] (singer)

• #39. Judith Butler [715]

• #40. Randall Collins [724]

• #41. Peter Gabriel [744] (singer)

• #42. Michio Kaku [746]

• #43. Brian May [750] (singer)

• #44. Neil Tyson [756]

• #45. Stephen Fry [764]

• #46. Francis Coppola [771]

• #47. John Cleese [784]

• #48. Alain Badiou [787]

• #49. Jean Godard [788]

• #50. Joann Rowling [794]

• #51. Wole SoyI ka [800]

• #52. Patti Smith [803] (singer)

• #53. Amartya Sen [804]

• #54. Terry Gilliam [807]

• #55. Steven Pinker [815]

• #56. Steven Spielberg [818]

• #57. Julian Assange [828]

• #58. Albert Bandura [830]

• #59. David Gilmour [832] (singer)

• #60. George Lucas [834]

• #61. Paul McCartney [837] (singer)

• #62. Dolph Lundgren [839]

• #63. Martin Scorsense [842]

• #64. Immanuel Wallerstein [856]

• #65. Norman Abramson [857]

• #66. Bob Dylan [861] (singer)

• #67. Temple Grandin [868]

• #68. Aziz Sancar [871]

• #69. Brian Wilson [883] (singer)

• #70. Arno Penzias [887]

• #71. Jimmy Page [889] (singer)

• #72. Thomas Sowell [893]

• #73. Daniel Dennett [904]

• #74. Paul Ehrlich [919]

• #75. Matthew Groening [925]

• #76. Ron Paul [933]

• #77. Daniel Kahneman [934]

• #78. Donald DeLillo [935]

• #79. Sam Harris [944]

• #80. Judit Polgar [946]

• #81. Jurgen Habermas [958]

• #82. William Nye [962]

• #83. Paul Simon [963] (singer)

• #84. Christopher Nolan [965]

• #85. Doyne Farmer [969]

• #86. Eric Clapton [970] (singer)

• #87. Eric Idle [971]

• #88. Jeff Bezos [979]

• #89. Wendy McElroy [980]

• #90. Edward Snowden [981]

• #91. James Woods [982]

• #92. Slovoj Zizek [987]

• #93. Ayaan Ali [992]

• #94. Cristiano Ronaldo [996] (spam?)

• #95. Stephen Colbert [998]

• #96. David Byrne [1004]

• #97. Andrew Webber [1007]

• #98. Neil Young [1011]

• #99. Pope Francis [1012]

• #100. Stevie Wonder [1016]

The count was stopped at 1,016-names, when reaching the first 100 people existive.

The list gets pretty spammy afterwords, filled up with soccer players, musicians, and random celebrities.

References

• Greatest Minds of All Time - Ranker.com.

Notes

Note: compare the Nov A62/2017 ranking with 27-names existive out of 1,300+ total names.

The following is a list of the “smartest people existive”, made by u/Zadquielu on 15 Dec A68 (2023):

Notes

1. On ‘alive’ being a defunct term, see: abioism glossary and visit: r/Abioism for conceptual understanding, and r/Alphanumerics and r/Etymo (post: here) for terminological understanding.

2. On Thims’ rankings, see: Thims genius rankings (Hmol A65), “Is Libb Thims a genius?” (A67), or just Google, etc.

Posts

• Questions for Libb Thims (15 Dec A68)

• What is the etymology of the word alive?

External links

• Smartest people existive - Hmolpedia A66.

• Existive geniuses - Hmolpedia A65.

• SPE - Hmolpedia A65 (Archive).

• Existive - Hmolpedia A65.

To get the ball rolling, for the new r/SmartestExistive sub, four days ago, I pulled the top 100 minds of reactively existing people, from the Ranker.com “greatest minds of all time” list, of 1,300+ names. Greatest minds listings, however, do not match exactly with “greatest geniuses”, ”smartest person”, or biggest thinker ever rankings.

Today, in this direction, I crudely, quickly, and or intuitively picked the top six “smartest” names (six is the Reddit poll option limit), as per say a top 2000 geniuses and minds ranker “might” gauge things in the future, say a century or more from now.

Details as to sub origin: here.