I Like Geniuses

I really like learning about geniuses, mainly because I wish I was one. They also inspire me to try to be great.

I enjoy learning about them through a YouTube channel called NewsThink. It delivers very detailed information about the lives of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, etc.

These sorts of videos really put into perspective how smart these people were and showed me that there are levels to intelligence. For example, growing up, I always heard of Isaac Newton and his laws, but I didn't think he was all that and a bag of chips. Then, as I was learning calculus in high school, I realized that never in a million years would I be able to discover the integral or derivative by myself. Yet Newton found those things and more in his twenties. He was, in fact, all that and a bag of chips.

Other notable and beautiful minds include all those portrayed in Oppenheimer (2023). And don't forget John von Neumann. Some people speculate that he was an alien on account of how wicked smart he was. I believe he's not as famous as Einstein or Newton in popular culture because his contributions are harder to grasp. When I first heard about his contributions to game theory, I thought of MatPat's YouTube channel. Come to think of it, MatPat is kind of a genius too, since he scored a perfect score on the SAT. Nevertheless, despite being a brilliant polymath, von Neumann had some very questionable opinions on the existence of the Soviet Union. They were so questionable, in fact, that I wouldn't ever have thought such opinions would come from a genius.

Before I wrap up this thought, my all-time favorite genius is John Nash. He practically conquered a debilitating mental illness using the same reasoning that earned him the Nobel and Abel prizes. Truly inspirational.

That concludes my thought. In an effort to avoid LARP accusations, I don't claim to understand the work of all these computational and analytical wizards. I do claim, with full confidence, that their stories are magically inspiring.