<p>It’s sort of a hard question to answer. Depends on how you define “smart,” for one thing. Also, some people don’t use their intelligence nearly as much as they could, and I’ve met bright people who tried to hide how bright they are. I’ve actually met more than one girl who finished undergrad summa cum laude without much effort who tried to downplay her intelligence and just wanted to focus on getting married, with no desire for grad school or anything like that. Other people amass academic accomplishments that might make them seem smart even if it was mostly through effort, diligence, etc. So it’s hard to judge.</p>
<p>All of these have been excellent points, so I don’t feel the need to restate them.</p>
<p>I often refer to someone as a genius, but I use it as a colloquial term. I have actually never met anyone personally that has just made me sit back and go…“wow…”. However, I have been extremely impressed with a lot of different people (people that would otherwise be dubbed as “genius”) because of their achievements, especially if there were seemingly insurmountable obstacles that they had to overcome.</p>
<p>Therefore?</p>
<p>I think geniuses are far and in-between. The ture ones anyway. But then again, who’s to define what a “genius” really is and what “someone-who-is-dangerously-close-to-genius-but-sadly-just-not-quite-one” is? I know I’m not.</p>
<p>I’ve yet to find someone hat truly knocks my socks off, but maybe that’s bcause I haven’t been staring in the mirror hard enough. Haha, I kid!</p>
<p>But seriously, one day I’ll have the priviledge of meeting that unique indiviual that will forever leave a one of a kind impression on me. ONE DAY.</p>
<p>I’ve never met this guy, but he went graduated from my high school six years ago and teachers still talk about his abilities. He was an IMO gold medalist, twice, was a International Junior chess champion, and was on graduate level mathematics with ease. Somehow in the middle of all this he was valedictorian of his class and got the IB diploma, a time-consuming sequences of courses taken in the junior/senior years. Also, he qualified for the chemistry olympiad study camp out of nowhere, without much extra studying in chemistry (but he declined it to go to math olympiad camp). Princeton begged him to go. Think about that. </p>
<p>I hear that he can interpret math journal articles at a legendary speed and got a ton of scholarships for his research in college as an undergrad. I need to meet him sometime.</p>
<p>Shawn Ku is by far the smartest person I’ve ever met and will ever meet!</p>
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<p>I don’t understand people like this. If he were really that smart, why did he get only a 1560? The SAT is really easy, especially for smart people, and truly smart people don’t need to put in much work at all to get a 4.0 at a top college.</p>
<p>My one friend is ridiculous. Here are only a few of his accomplishments:
-qualified for USAMO every year since 9th grade
-led the ARML (American Regions Math League) team to three consecutive national championships
-performed in Carnegie Hall
-got a 2370 on his SAT first try and didn’t feel like taking it again
-scored ten fives on his AP tests
-made an important breakthrough on supersingular elliptic curves…(I read his report and I didn’t understand the first paragraph)
-gone to Beijing to present his math thing and came back ranked 6th in the world
-won a national Roland piano competition (sequenced his own rock medley)
-placed at states for cross country
-has just been named a Siemens and Intel finalist.
-He’s already gotten into MIT and applied to Harvard RD.
-named homecoming king</p>
<p>And on top of that, his personality is literally the best one I’ve ever known - he’s SO social and you will become friends with him if he’s in the same room. AND he’s pretty good-looking.</p>
<p>I feel like I’m forgetting a lot more…</p>
<p>My high schools validictorian… dudes a boss. Went to Brown. Pretty sure he never got a B in his life, probably never got an A- either. Was in almost all of my classes, great guy, good friend of mine. He was the kid in class you were so happy to beat on a test for once. Didn’t even matter what you got because you beat/tied John haha. </p>
<p>I fully expect him to save the world.</p>
<p>Me. I’m the smartest person because I figured out a way to unlock over half of the unused potential that is stored within our brains.</p>
<p>My high school biology teacher. He understands biology so well that he can answer practically any question about it. But he also understands many other subjects and life in general. He is able to get students excited about science and is so funny and likable.</p>
<p>Basically, he is my role model.</p>
<p>Dnation… are you a mind reader? do you have ESP?</p>
<p>My Calc III professor amazed me. Definitely the smartest/most intelligent man I’ve ever run across. Harvard undergrad, PhD from Brown. Literally knows almost everything about math (but acts like he doesn’t).</p>
<p>While at Harvard as an undergrad he finished in the top 5 of the prestigious Putnam Mathematics competition/test (google it to find out about the difficulty of the exam)…and he did it twice!</p>
<p>I’ve watched him factor 8 degree polynomials in one step.</p>
<p>I’ve given him verbal probability questions requiring computation of some large Combinations, and he did it in his head…in about the same time as a calculator.</p>
<p>He had 90 students’ names memorized by the second day of class (two full sections)…only by looking at their student ID photos on the registry.</p>
<p>I’ve also heard he was the inspiration for the professor’s cloned son in Futurama, as he was roommates with it’s creator while at Harvard (claim hasn’t been validated yet).</p>
<p>Yeah…safe to say the guy is super smart.</p>
<p>I think you have to be really smart to identify a genius. I don’t believe that most of you know whether your “genius friends” are just way above your intelligence or if they’re really genius.</p>
<p>Not a claim I can justify, obviously. Just a hunch.</p>
<p>This 12 year old kid who was in my college chemistry course. He’s obnoxious and has no social skills (drove my professor insane as well as most of us in the class), but he’s clearly a prodigy. The kid was taking Calc III at the age of 12.</p>
<p>“I’ve watched him factor 8 degree polynomials in one step.”</p>
<p>Out of all these posts, this line stuck out to me the most as being the most impressive haha. No reason why.</p>
<p>^ so he memorized Pascals Triangle. ( I think that’s what it was called)</p>
<p>Well, this probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone on CC because it doesn’t involve math, science, HYPSM or the SAT, but I have a friend who’s my age who has played classical guitar on national radio stations, is a ridiculously amazing writer, and speaks Russian, Arabic, French and Spanish… impressive to me, anyway.</p>
<p>@MLDWoody ^: That’s only if the polynomial was of the form (x+k)^n, so it only had one term raised to the eigth power. That wouldn’t be very impressive, even I have Pascal’s triangle memorized up till 5. If there were more than 4 terms in that polynomial, I would be impressed.</p>
<p>OT: I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who I would call a genius. The closest I would say is my friend who got a 1520 on his SAT, but he can’t do calculus at all.</p>
<p>^There is a formula. You don’t need to memorize Pascal’s Triangle.</p>
<p>It wasn’t as simple as memorizing Pascal’s triangle, which somebody could do if they were expanding a term, say (2x-4)^8.</p>
<p>He was able to factor some crazy polynomial (ex, 4x^8 + 3x^7 + …+ 28) in one step, in order get it into a series of factors for a system of equations. Most people with reasonable algebra skills can do this type of factoring…but it takes several steps. Doing it in one step is extremely difficult.</p>
<p>^it’s probably because he did it so many times in class…</p>