Posted on 09/29/2005 6:49:35 PM PDT by wagglebee
Tesla was definitely one of the most brilliant, and usually the most forgotten also. what is this tesla cult thing?
Marconi is one of my personal favorite inventors. Without him, how would El Rushbo conduct his show? Morse code?
My personal vote goes to Newton. Without question. Nobody else even comes close.
http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Isaac_Newton_(Alan_Sinder)
Liebniz would take exception to that.
Every so often, a truly great mind comes along to bring an illumination. Da Vinci was one of those.
I agree...Newton. The man gave us specific instructions, along with a math he invented to compute the answers, on how bodies in the universe work.
It took Sputnik to prove him right.
John Adams was the genius behind the Massachussetts constitution upon which the US Constitution was based. Pretty good intellect, I would say!
Leibniz, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann...so many.
I believe that Newton solved a previously unsolvable problem using antidifferential equations, thereby developing differential calculus. The Greeks actully started the whole mess by trying to solve the unsolvable, ruining many budding mathemeticians.
My money is on James Madison.
A living heart would be pretty hard to study, actually, it'd be shaking and squirting blood all over, obscuring the examination. And cutting a living heart enough to get a good view of the valve in action would result in abnormal or non-functional operation.
Da Vinci could have cut the valve area out of a fresh human or animal heart, and then poured clear liquids through it from different directions to study how it operated.
Reminds me a program I saw recently on the History Channel about Galen the physician. He was performing cataract surgeries in ancient Rome. But the technology was completely lost in Medieval Europe.
the quote says "since Newton" so one assumes he's place Newton, then Maxwell.
I'd give Da Vinci the edge over Newton. There's no doubt that Newton was an absolute genius at mathematics, and this gave him some fundamental insights into the mathematical relationships of physics, but -- and I in no way mean this in disrespect -- mathematical geniuses are a dime a dozen, even if most of them never achieve any public recognition.
Da Vinci, however, was an innovater and world-class master of so *many* diverse fields, each one of them a career in themselves, each one of which would have insured his lasting fame if that one field was the only one in which he had made his accomplishments.
Painting, sculpting, architecture, anatomy, engineering, mechanics, optics, hydraulics, drafting, warfare, mathematics... He even made discoveries in meteorology, geology, and paleontology.
Newton was was one of the all-time greats in mathematics. Da vinci was one of the all-time greats in *everything* he put his mind to, including pursuits which are generally considered different "kinds" of genius -- how often do we expect brilliant artists to be scientific geniuses as well, or vice versa?
Still, the case could be made that Newton achieved more in mathematics than Da Vinci did in any one of his many fields of study, but the kind of versatile genius which can master everything it contemplates gets my vote over the kind which excels, no matter how superbly, in a narrower discipline.
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That's true.
Might you include Aristotle as the greatest polymath?
Would you consider Thomas Acquinas as the greatest philosopher/theologian?
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This is almost an art/science ping, but I found it fascinating.
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