There is a degree of subjectivity to what each of us would describe as “extreme intelligence.” Some have described Mozart as a genius for his innate musical sense, and many would attribute extremely high intelligence to Shakespeare for his remarkable insight into human nature and his linguistic skill in the cogent expression of ideas. In his well-researched book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C to 1950, Charles Murray explored extreme accomplishment across a wide spectrum of human cognitive endeavors including philosophy, science, literature, and the arts. In each area, he identified the “giants” who accounted for a major portion of the achievements, providing evidence to support his contention that a “handful of humans” in each category made almost all of the significant contributions.
However, in research for the book Intelligence, we took a more restricted view of “extreme intelligence” as the ability to explore complex abstract ideas in formulating new paradigms that destroy old beliefs while providing new insights. Also included, was the ability to solve deep problems that would prove intractable to almost all humans. This restricted definition inevitably brought our investigation into the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
The first mountain top of intellectual achievement that stood head and shoulders above anything that went before, was Isaac Newton’s mathematical formulation of physics and his co-invention of the calculus. This tour de force presented in his 1687 publication Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica changed science from a collection of related observations to an intellectual discipline in which observable variables are connected by equations that facilitate prediction. By the early 18th century, the scholars of the emerging Age of Enlightenment were both mystified and awe-stricken by the predictive power of the new physics. The eminent French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange asserted:
Newton was surely the man of genius par excellence, but we must agree that he was also the luckiest: one finds only once the system of the world to be solved!
When Sir Isaac Newton was praised for his remarkable achievements, he paid tribute to Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and others with the acknowledgement, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
In our search for the modern mountain tops of intellectual achievement, we came upon the insights of Charles Darwin, including his Principle of Natural Selection, that provided a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of the human species. This was one of humankind’s greatest inferences, drawn from extensive observations over a period of several years. Though it may seem obvious to us now, this was a revolutionary insight during an era when the commonly accepted belief in our origins was enshrined in various religious narratives that prevented our species from understanding from whence we came.
In the early 20th century, most Americans regarded Thomas Edison as the quintessential genius because his many inventions, including the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph, lit the way to a series of inventions by Tesla and others that enhanced the quality of human life. However, as physics moved into realms remote from human experience, an understanding of mathematics and the ability to think in the abstract became increasingly important and Albert Einstein displaced Edison as the icon for extreme intelligence. Einstein’s Special and General Relativity Theories gave us equations that describe the dynamics of our universe, replacing Newtonian physics with a new paradigm.
In 1931, shortly after Einstein received public acclaim, an unknown Austrian mathematician scaled another mountain top of intellectual power. Kurt Gödel, at age 25 published his doctoral thesis, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. In this document, he proved that there are some mathematical propositions that we can neither prove nor disprove in our current mathematical systems. This discovery shook the foundations of mathematics and destroyed many of the assumptions underpinning certainty in this discipline. A host of other mathematicians such as John von Neumann, Andrew Wiles, and Grigory Perelman could be included among those who have solved seemingly intractable mathematical problems that eluded the rest of the mathematical community, qualifying their achievements as intellectual mountaintops. There have also been several in the area of computer science and in the applied technologies.
The examples presented above are only a small sample of the intellectual mountain tops achieved by those in the STEM subjects where the deepest levels of abstract problem solving comes into play. If 100 scholars were asked to list 30 examples of extreme intelligence, there would be a lot of diversity, but Newton, Darwin, and Einstein would appear on most, if not all, of the lists.
