Genius has many different faces. Newton, Einstein, von Neumann, Turing and Gödel were geniuses in their ability to think in the abstract and use mathematics to formulate their ideas. Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison were inventive geniuses, and Mozart and Bach displayed a genius for music.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs each displayed a different kind of genius. Bill Gates is a highly intelligent person who has a reported IQ of 160 and achieved a score of 1590 out of 1600 in his SATs. In the biography Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, (p.64–5) Bill Gates described to his biographers, James Wallace and Jim Erickson, his ruminations as he contemplated his future:
I met several people in the math department who were quite a bit better than I was at math. It changed my view about going into math. You can persevere in the field of math and make incredible breakthroughs, but it probably discouraged me. It made the odds much longer that I could do some world-class thing. I had to really think about it. Hey, I’m going to sit in a room, staring at a wall for five years, and even if I come up with something, who knows. So it made me think about whether math was something I wanted to do or not.
Steve Jobs was also gifted. Reporting on an interview with Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson wrote:
Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill *[his teacher]* had Jobs tested. “I scored at the high school sophomore level” he recalled. Now that it was clear, not only to himself and his parents, but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special, the school made the remarkable proposal that he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip only one grade. The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself with kids a year older.
Isaacson further reported that when Steve was a teenager, he came to work at Atari, but other employees complained that his personality was “prickly” and that he reeked of body odor. Nolan Bushnell the eccentric and ebullient founder and President, recognizing Steve’s exceptional intelligence, assigned him to the night shift where he could work alone.
Yet, both Gates and Jobs changed the lives of us all by developing the personal computer and following with a vast array of technological tools. Gates was talented as a programmer, but his real gifts emerged in his ability to anticipate the software needs of the future and build Microsoft around that demand. Jobs’ genius resided in his vision of what could be. Though the programming was done by his associate Steve Wozniak, Jobs was the businessman to visualized what people wanted and created it for them. After building the Apple empire to a behemoth, he was fired by the Board. He subsequently founded Pixar and sold it to Disney. Then the floundering Apple Inc. invited him back and he pulled the company out of economic hardship with the successful iPhone.
It is true that neither Gates nor Jobs were capable of the depth of abstraction possessed by the mathematicians or theoretical physicists mentioned above, but then, von Neumann, Gödel, and Turing did not have the skill set to perform the feats of Gates or Jobs. That’s why we need geniuses of all stripes in our exciting world of discovery and innovation.
