Who was smarter?

[learnin to learn]

Who do yall think was smarter Albert Einstien or Isaac Newton?

[FetusHead]

I'm going to go with Herve Villachaize.

[Merek]

im gonna go with albert einstein. :naughty:

[GAHD]

Newton and Edison were patent feinds, Einstein was a patent clerk. But I still say Tesla beats them all.

[rockytriton]

and rockytriton is a patent office software engineer! :naughty:

 

by the way, how does one measure smartness?

[Qfwfq]

how does one measure smartness?

Not by how many patents one has taken out.

 

BTW, what patents did Newton take out?

 

As for the initial question, Newton was by far a better mathematician than Einstein. Both had great insight and it's hard to give a comparative.

[rockytriton]

eh..... I REALLY doubt that newton had any US patents!

[GAHD]

Newton's most known invention/patent; the reflecting telescope.

[rockytriton]

I guess this was some sort of british patent, i know that the US patent system wasn't started until 1790. I guess there actually IS a world outside of the US though.

[learnin to learn]

I personally think Einstien was smarter, but then again he probally would not have be as famous if it wasnt for the discoveries of Newton.

[learnin to learn]

I'm going to go with Herve Villachaize.

 

who is that?

[Boerseun]

I'm gonna have to side with Newton.

 

Granted - Einstein gave us the bomb, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Newton had a lot less to work with.

 

I mean - inventing calculus over a weekend because the mathematics of the day was simply inadequate for your requirements takes cajones. BIG ones, at that.

 

It's a pity there's only two choices, because Kepler and a few other candidates spring to mind as well.

[learnin to learn]

fell free to add any other candidates!!!!:)

[Qfwfq]

I guess there actually IS a world outside of the US though.

There certainly IS. :) And it was there even before the US were the US.

[infamous]

fell free to add any other candidates!!!!:)

For the great diversity of his intellect: Leonardo Davinci

[CraigD]

Defining “smarter” as meaning “having more raw mental computing ability”, I guess Newton was smarter that Einstein.

 

Both were pencil & paper users, and while Einstein could keep his work neat and on track, it’s rumored that Newton could churn out flawless Math for manic periods of days or weeks, from his teenage Oxford days to his old age as the Most Famous Natural Philosopher in the World. The two were similar in that, during and for a generation after their lives, common people would invoke their names to mean “a genius”.

 

I don’t think either were as smart as Ramanujan, von Neumann, Godel, or a pack of Math-types too obscure to come to mind.

 

(Newton was, by all accounts, as crazy as Godel. It's believed Newton systematically poisoned himself with a plethora of exotic toxins in a search for physical immortality, while Godel literally starved himself to death in the irrational belief that everyone in the world meant to poison him).

 

IMHO, the freakishly mentally endowed tend toward the study of pure Math, attracted by the sheer difficulty of it. Physicists seem more pragmatic and cognizant of their own mental limitations.

[steelengineer]

I think that due to the deep understanding that is required of Einstein's ideas, he was smarter. whereas, Newton's ideas were based on brand new fundamentals, but very easy to understand. but no doubt, the mental capabilities they both had were relatively pretty high. I would also consider Euler a genius of the same category.