If we were to ask a large number of people the question, “Who is the most intelligent person alive today?,” we would obtain a fairly large diversity of answers depending upon how people measure intelligence. For example, those who measure achievement in academic domains might name Terrence Tao, Andrew Wiles, or Ed Witten. The metric used to compare the intelligence of these people would be the perceived impact of their discoveries or creations.
Those who think of the “movers and shakers” in the entrepreneurial world as the most intelligent people might select Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page or Bill Gates. These billionaires are at the top of Forbes list of the wealthiest people on the planet and many people may look at this as a metric for comparing their intelligence.
Many people think that intelligence, like height, is an attribute that can be mapped onto a scale so that for any two people one can be identified as smarter than the other. However, intelligence unlike height, is a multi-faceted attribute. This means that A may be smarter than B in one aspect of intelligence, but B may be smarter than A in another. (Mathematicians would say that classification of people by height yields a linearly-ordered set, while classification of people by intelligence is a partially-ordered set.) The diagram below shows that while height and weight are linearly-ordered sets, intelligence is partially-ordered, because it has many dimensions.
To compare the intelligence of A and B, we could merely sum their scores on each scale. However, performance in academic research draws more heavily on some components of intelligence, than performance in entrepreneurial ventures, and conversely. This results in a different formula for intelligence as you change the domain of reference. In the animal kingdom, we ask who is smarter, domestic dogs or wolves. The answer is that domestic dogs are smarter at coexisting with humans and wolves are smarter at working together in hunting their prey.
Even within the same field, intelligence and genius are measured by a subjective evaluation of the importance of each achievement. A mathematician might rate Gauss above Einstein, while a physicist might assert that Einstein was more intelligent than Gauss. The one thing that we can say for sure is that all these people who rise to the top in their fields reside in the pantheon of extremely high intelligence where measures of comparative intelligence are meaningless.
