# 94 Dolly Parton.
Top 100 living geniuses
Last Updated: 1:06am GMT 29/10/2007
1= Albert Hoffman (Swiss) Chemist 27
1= Tim Berners-Lee (British) Computer Scientist 27
3 George Soros (American) Investor & Philanthropist 25
4 Matt Groening (American) Satirist & Animator 24
5= Nelson Mandela (South African) Politician & Diplomat 23
5= Frederick Sanger (British) Chemist 23
7= Dario Fo (Italian) Writer & Dramatist 22
7= Steven Hawking (British) Physicist 22
9= Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian) Architect 21
9= Philip Glass (American) Composer 21
9= Grigory Perelman (Russian) Mathematician 21
12= Andrew Wiles (British) Mathematician 20
12= Li Hongzhi (Chinese) Spiritual Leader 20
12= Ali Javan (Iranian) Engineer 20
15= Brian Eno (British) Composer 19
15= Damian Hirst (British) Artist 19
15= Daniel Tammet (British) Savant & Linguist 19
18 Nicholson Baker (American Writer 18
19 Daniel Barenboim (N/A) Musician 17
20= Robert Crumb (American) Artist 16
20= Richard Dawkins (British) Biologist and philosopher 16
20= Larry Page & Sergey Brin (American) Publishers 16
20= Rupert Murdoch (American) Publisher 16
20= Geoffrey Hill (British) Poet 16
25 Garry Kasparov (Russian) Chess Player 15
26= The Dalai Lama (Tibetan) Spiritual Leader 14
26= Steven Spielberg (American) Film maker 14
26= Hiroshi Ishiguro (Japanese) Roboticist 14
26= Robert Edwards (British) Pioneer of IVF treatment 14
26= Seamus Heaney (Irish) Poet 14
31 Harold Pinter (British) Writer & Dramatist 13
32= Flossie Wong-Staal (Chinese) Bio-technologist 12
32= Bobby Fischer (American) Chess Player 12
32= Prince (American) Musician 12
32= Henrik Gorecki (Polish) Composer 12
32= Avram Noam Chomski (American) Philosopher & linguist 12
32= Sebastian Thrun (German) Probabilistic roboticist 12
32= Nima Arkani Hamed (Canadian) Physicist 12
32= Margaret Turnbull (American) Astrobiologist 12
40= Elaine Pagels (American) Historian 11
40= Enrique Ostrea (Philippino) Pediatrics & neonatology 11
40= Gary Becker (American) Economist 11
43= Mohammed Ali (American) Boxer 10
43= Osama Bin Laden (Saudi) Islamicist 10
43= Bill Gates (American) Businessman 10
43= Philip Roth (American) Writer 10
43= James West (American) Invented the foil electrical microphone 10
43= Tuan Vo-Dinh (Vietnamese) Bio-Medical Scientist 10
49= Brian Wilson (American) Musician 9
49= Stevie Wonder (American) Singer songwriter 9
49= Vint Cerf (American) Computer scientist 9
49= Henry Kissinger (American) Diplomat and politician 9
49= Richard Branson (British) Publicist 9
49= Pardis Sabeti (Iranian) Biological anthropologist 9
49= Jon de Mol (Dutch) Television producer 9
49= Meryl Streep (American) Actress 9
49= Margaret Attwood (Canadian) Writer 9
58= Placido Domingo (Spanish) Singer 8
58= John Lasseter (American) Digital Animator 8
58= Shunpei Yamazaki (Japanese) Computer scientist & physicist 8
58= Jane Goodall (British) Ethologist & Anthropologist 8
58= Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri (Indian) Historian 8
58= John Goto (British) Photographer 8
58= Paul McCartney (British) Musician 8
58= Stephen King (American) Writer 8
58= Leonard Cohen (American) Poet & musician 8
67= Aretha Franklin (American) Musician 7
67= David Bowie (British) Musician 7
67= Emily Oster (American) Economist 7
67= Steve Wozniak (American) Engineer and co-founder of Apple Computers 7
67= Martin Cooper (American) Inventor of the cell phone 7
72= George Lucas (American) Film maker 6
72= Niles Rogers (American) Musician 6
72= Hans Zimmer (German) Composer 6
72= John Williams (American) Composer 6
72= Annette Baier (New Zealander) Philosopher 6
72= Dorothy Rowe (British) Psychologist 6
72= Ivan Marchuk (Ukrainian) Artist & sculptor 6
72= Robin Escovado (American) Composer 6
72= Mark Dean (American) Inventor & computer scientist 6
72= Rick Rubin (American) Musician & producer 6
72= Stan Lee (American) Publisher 6
83= David Warren (Australian) Engineer 5
83= Jon Fosse (Norwegian) Writer & dramatist
83= Gjertrud Schnackenberg (American) Poet 5
83= Graham Linehan (Irish) Writer & dramatist 5
83= JK Rowling (British) Writer 5
83= Ken Russell (British) Film maker 5
83= Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (Russian) Small arms designer 5
83= Erich Jarvis (American) Neurobiologist 5
91=. Chad Varah (British) Founder of Samaritans 4
91= Nicolas Hayek (Swiss) Businessman and founder of Swatch 4
91= Alastair Hannay (British) Philosopher 4
94= Patricia Bath (American) Ophthalmologist
94= Thomas A. Jackson (American) Aerospace engineer 3
94= Dolly Parton (American) Singer 3
94= Morissey (British) Singer 3
94= Michael Eavis (British) Organiser of Glastonbury 3
94= Ranulph Fiennes (British) Adventurer 3
100=. Quentin Tarantino (American) Filmmaker 2
Where was the SPEW, HURL, BARF alert???
And yet Britain today is a mere shadow of its former self, so I don’t know what to make of this.
Britain has more living geniuses per head of population than anywhere else in the world, according to a new survey which...emailed 4,000 Britons.
One thing is for sure. The people who came up with this survey are certainly not geniuses.
OBL is a genious? I beg to differ.
"It's a Mensa Thing-YOU wouldn't understand."
I guess that accounts for the inclusion of such laughable non-geniuses as George Soros, Leonard Cohen and Damian Hurst, etc.
Albert Hoffman? A genius who licks his fingers in the lab, then poisons his colleagues with an unknown psychoactive?
I don’t know about Dolly Parton, but David Bowie?
The more ridiculous the list, the more talk it synthesizes.
(I’m no exception, see, I just posted to FR about the silly list!)
They left the smartest woman in the world off the list.
Calling a tail a leg again...
I have seen a lot of these 100 best or worst etc. lists over the years. I don’t think I have ever seen one which made much sense.
This may be the worst one of all. Muhammad Ali?
I mean I like Dolly Parton as much as the next guy, if you know what I mean, and she’s real nice, pretty smart and talented and all,...but a genius? I don’t think so.
Nelson Mandela? Are you kidding? A guy too dumb to break out of jail for 30 years?
Mohammad Ali? You’re joking. Perhaps a genius for narcissistic self promotion and egotism.
Aretha is great. Great voice. Not smart enough to keep the weight off.
Philip Glass? A master of tedium and mind numbing repetition.
Bowie is pretty damn smart.
Real geniuses: Michaelangelo, Vermeer, Caravaggio,Leonardo da Vinci, JS Bach among others.
Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm, chose their geniuses by awarding scores out of 10 to each entrant against a number of factors: paradigm shifting; popular acclaim; intellectual power; achievement and cultural importance. The firm emailed 4,000 Britons this summer and asked them to nominate up to 10 living people who they considered geniuses.
Oh. Buzzword voodoo.
I'm ... NOT ... impressed.
Utterly worthless.
This list is stoopid! My name was supposed to be in the top ten!
And,,,”George Soros, the American financier and philanthropist?”
Gimme a break! Didn’t he almost cause The Bank of England to fail? And they vote for him?
Am I wrong about the Bank?
Nonsense, AlGore invented the worldwide web. Everybody knows that.
...
The Americans have 43 geniuses on the list – one per 6.9 million people.
Only in Britain would 24 British geniuses be a larger number than 43 American geniuses.
And why were Albert Einstein and the Wright Bros. left off the list?
Dolly Parton is more of a genius than Einstein or the Wrights?
Ri-ight...
British brains are indubitably the most valuable brains on the planet.
Do you have any idea how may Brits it takes to produce a pound of brains?
Dr. Frank N. Stein
He’s right you know.
Eye-gore