A debate this evening with my wife, after she proclaimed one of her directors at work to be the most intelligent person she had ever physically met/ spoken with.

Lots of debate on the criteria for intelligent, but roughly defined as:
-high IQ
-exceptional depth of knowledge on specialist subjects
-range of interests/ knowledge e.g. not just chemistry, but music, history culture as well.
-an ability to articulate their knowledge to others
-a willingness/ desire to learn more in all areas.

Best I could come up with was my dissertation tutor at uni, but I feel that’s not a very satisfying answer, so maybe need to meet some more intelligent people!

Who have you met that blew your mind with theirs?

I know a few rocket scientists (and engineers)….

My girlfriend at university. Got a first and then a PhD and is now very high up in some large pharmaceutical company.
Rarely ever saw her study but instantly understood complex stuff.

Apparently, according to one of my daughter’s boyfriend’s after a holiday away, I was described as “surprisingly knowledgeable”! I know this doesn’t directly address the post but in the Fire Service we had at a certain period lots of miners (retained) and ex miners. They used what they called “pit logic”, solutions to the problems we faced at times came from that source. Qualification’s are not always the solution, some people can appear to be intelligent and be quite stupid and some people can appear to be stupid and be very intelligent!
Most of them attended Grassmoor University…

My mother. Hard science degree from Cambridge in the 50s and a masters ( from a very modest background so extra difficult)  Extremely knowledgeable and well read both in her subjects and in general

common sense of a tree stump unfortunately and not much more emotional intelligence

One of the consultants I worked with always struck me as extremely intelligent as well and had emotional intelligence to go with it.  I didn’t know her well enough to be sure but I saw her take cocky male junior doctors down a peg or two effortlessly a couple of times with arcane knowledge and I never saw her stumped for an answer on anything.  Brilliant woman.  the best I have ever worked with.

Intelligence is rather more than the narrow definition you gave but thats going with your definition

I work in a lab surrounded by geniuses, one behind every door!

For sure, some of them would burn their house down trying to boil an egg, but others have huge intellect as well as deep subject knowledge.

I couldn’t really pick any of them out and certainly won’t name them but if forced I have one in mind – Prof of Quantum engineering and also a Doctor of Music and just an incredible warm, caring human being.

mcmoonter is one of the most intelligent blokes i have met.

the heart surgeon who mended my ticker, Steve Hunter was also pretty clued up.

My wife

Example one, we went trekking in Nepal. She might a phrase book. In under a week she sat buy the fire every night swapping life stories in Nepali and I’m reading a book

Example two, when the the kids were young she learnt and Latin Greek to stay keep her mind busy. Putting in about a third of the recommended time a week she’s was getting over 90% on every assignment

Example three, she went Oxford to do Geography. In one of her A level exams she wrote an essay on a topic she hasn’t been taught to make it more interesting

Oh and I taught called Shaun. Came back from his practice oxbridge interview saying that the guy who interviewed him said “I’ve been sat here doing an interview every 20 minutes but there weeks. Your the best I’ve seen by far”.

Oh and I taught Conor Travers the lad who one countdown at 14. He was clever

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_Travers

A girl in the neighbouring flat at uni. She was studying astrophysics (she got a 1st) but in moments of boredom she’d just casually learn Klingon or Latin, solve Rubiks Cube in 12 seconds, do a few watercolour paintings (that would gave earned her a 1st in art class…) and so on. She even attended lectures with her best friend in an entirely different subject and did insanely well at that too. She literally went to lectures that had no relevance to her own course just for fun, just for something else to learn!

Incredibly bright. Very very introverted though, really not a social person at all.

Makes me think of the laws of stupidity and the definition of stupidity (I think it was on this forum a few weeks ago?)

1. Bandits: people who gain at others expense
2. Helpless: people who benefit others at their own expense
3. Intelligent: people who provide gains for both themselves and others
4. Stupid: people who cost others without gaining, or even losing, something themselves.

For me a intelligent person can’t just be very knowledgeable in one area. Could be the best mathematician in the world but if you have no common sense and can’t cope with real life problems you are smart but not intelligent.

For me you need to be widely knowledgeable, have a specialist subject, be able to apply your knowledge, to solve a problem. Capable of learning outside your field quickly with humility.

I struggle with best but have met some very good people all with their own way of being.

My child, he knows everything

Apparently

A couple spring to find.
One is now a surgeon, but falls into the category of very, very clever but no common sense.
The other had no qualifications and learnt accountancy on the job, not a huge amount of knowledge about anything but his ability to work stuff out given any problem, not just work, but anything really, was impressive

Long time ago at my Uni.

One friend who is a physicist did not attend any lectures, not even once, at all at the Uni and graduated with high 2(1) and later worked at Lloyd. Another one from Birmingham was drinking a lot and hardly studied at all and graduated with 1st. Same for another few of them who got high 2(1) while spending times playing guitars. The way I see it, it’s either you are born with it or you don’t. i.e. high IQ and probably EQ too. Those were the days.

At work now I have know several colleagues with high IQ but also with high ego, but never both high IQ and EQ.

Depends on what you are meaning by intelligent, most amazing one was akin to a beautiful mind, where he was doing the maths in his head for each question with multiple steps and providing the answer way ahead of those with calculators. I’ve met others who are quiet and try to make the complicated simple, being foremost experts in their field (rocket science and aerospace), and i’ve met others where you are just left behind due to how vast their knowledge is and how quickly they are running through their solutions.

Same with mechanically minded folk i’ve worked with, they can tell what an issue is by sound, or feel, and be as accurate as any diagnostic kit.

A classmate in my A-level Biology and Chemistry classes at 6th form. I genuinely believe he could have been one of those “graduates from Oxbridge at 9 years old” types but he stuck around with the rest of us for the social side I guess. I remember him as a really funny and modest guy with unreal powers of comprehension; he simply “got” everything he was presented with in class and then some. Just googled him and it looks like he studied at both Oxford and Cambridge is now a consultant neurologist, lecturer and post-doc research fellow.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

@mattyfez A lot of truth in that.

Pfffffffff sigh, I don’t really have much to offer intelligent people.

I used to work with a polymath.

Pick a subject, he’d know it in depth. Academic subjects like Physics, knowledge subjects like History, you name it. He took it upon himself to learn Russian for no other reason than it looked interesting.

He was also a practising Christian, an obligate carnivore, and a (mostly) recovering alcoholic.

Strange chap but very, very interesting.

In 2002, I worked for an opto-elctronic start up. 50 PhDs out of around 150 staff. Two PhDs in my team of seven. Some very smart people (I got thrown off my degree🤣). But some of them struggled to put their shoes on!

A life long friend is a head teacher, member of mensa with an iq of 148. I don’t think he’s that clever, but…he has an absolutely incredible memory. Not saying it’s photographic, but he can recall in detail things from school, etc.

So my point here is, is he actually smart or because of his recall, he can remember stuff?

I was at school up to O levels with a lad who was really clever.  He was bored in the run-up to O levels so he taught himself to speak Welsh from a book; later drank nearly half a bottle of whisky on the way into a chemistry exam (top grade but couldn’t really remember being in there).  Ended up doing natural sciences at some Oxbridge college and I heard he dropped out because everyone was so bloody pleased with themselves just for being clever.  Bit chippy, then; maybe that was his flaw !

My wife’s a doctor and when they were juniors one of the girls from her uni year told me about a lad who was on the training rotation with her “his brain works so much better than mine – totally different”.  Was a genuinely high-performing sportsman too (at least 2 – unrelated), but ded modest about it.  Oh, and a nice bloke.  Git

(On “photo-recall”, give her the subject matter and I reckon my wife could probably still describe in detail pretty much any text book page, including her added notes, from her medical degree – terrifying.  Married me though, so she’s oot)

I once spent the afternoon in the company of Heinz Wolff showing round us round his lab @ Brunel

So my point here is, is he actually smart or because of his recall, he can remember stuff?

The issue is there’s no empirical indicator of intelligence… for example, my old step father, very nice guy, dumb as a rock by acedemic standards.

But, he could drink ten pints, put a blindfold on, and strip, clean the valves and refit a cylinder head. Okay that’s a slight exaggeration, but the guy could fix anything on a car without thinking about it or reading a manual. Put a Mensa test in front of him and the result would not be good.

@mattyfez

Totally agree! My father was the same. Could fix anything. But when we got him his first computer, you could see the fear in his face.

A couple of people stand out, I was on a tour at the cancer research facility in Cambridge, after the tour we were given an informal talk by one of the research scientists. Very clever man with the ability to explain clever things to idiots 😀
I was a UKAS lab manager for a few years, a couple of the calibration services we supplied were unique within the uk so when it came time for us to be assessed another clever man would be dispatched from the national physical laboratory. Very knowledgeable chap about a wide range of subjects and some very interesting conversations were had, a mentally exhausting couple of days each visit for me though 😀

My sister, a clever woman herself was quite taken with Brian Cox when she met him at a works function, to the point she confessed to being a bit star struck. I think she’d have probably kidnapped him given half a chance.

By a long way my old boss who was also the owner of the business and someone quite famous and very wealthy.

The only problem being that his EQ was very low so he was often very difficult to deal with and is universally known as the rudest man in his industry, which he still dominates in the UK despite/because of that, mostly through sheer vision, obsession for detail, intimate knowledge of what people want and at what price, the quickest mind you can imagine, which all combine to make near perfect execution of his visionary and genius ideas.

I always admired him yet I am so happy I don’t work for him and feel sorry for those who still do. I speak to some and they keep using the same expletives about him that they were using 25 years ago.

Alan Sugar? 🤣🤣

I agree that defining intelligence is impossible, but I think the variety of cases above shows that we all think about it differently, admire different aspects of it and know people who exhibit it in different ways.

To be honest I hadn’t really considered emotional intelligence- maybe because mine is lacking!?

To be honest I hadn’t really considered emotional intelligence- maybe because mine is lacking!?

A good point, I’ve met some technical genuises in my time, but have the social and life skills of gherkin.
One guy I used to work with springs to mind, an IT engineer… you could give him any problem, and I mean any problem and it would be fixed. Just could never get an explanation of what he did, or how he did it…. probably an astute M.O. on his behalf hahah!

Work in science/medicine and while I have never met a Nobel prize winner I have worked with/for many profs with well over 500 publications in cancer/haematology/genetics. Most intelligent or has the biggest impact with their work is hard to separate.

One died recently who was part of the initial classification which all leukaemia was based on for many years.

A good friend was a team leader at the Sanger in Cambridge, took a break from science only to come back to it and is an assoc prof at 36 in probably the worlds top cancer research hospital and is putting out about 20+ articles a year in Nature, Cell New England Journal of Medicine etc She is changing global practise in leukaemia with her work.

The one that most took me most by surprise was at a dinner surrounded by illustrious professors and I was sat next to someone and I got chatting to him. Turns out he is THE global expert in radiation and its impact and has been brought in by every government to consult on nuclear accidents from Chernobyl to Fukushima. Turned out he also won an Emmy!

Felt pretty in awe that evening

The spelling on this thread is some of the worst I have ever seen – and for me to notice it must be bad!

Trying to work out the correlation! 😀

-high IQ
-exceptional depth of knowledge on specialist subjects
-range of interests/ knowledge e.g. not just chemistry, but music, history culture as well.
-an ability to articulate their knowledge to others
-a willingness/ desire to learn more in all areas.

MCJnr probably. For someone not yet 20, his ability in all those areas is ridiculous. I’ve met friends of his at Cambridge who maybe have the specialist knowledge in their subjects, but they are proper nerds with a narrow range of skills.

This apple seems to have fallen a long way from the tree 🤔

Interesting that most of the above posts associate intelligence with formal qualifications and distinguished universities. Intelligence can be so much more (but I’m not in that club).

Interesting that most of the above posts associate intelligence with formal qualifications and distinguished universities. Intelligence can be so much more (but I’m not in that club).

It needs to be quantifiable with evidence otherwise not justifiable.

As one of my colleague used to say to me “I am a Chartered Engineer …”

My wife’s dad got a scholarship to Oxford a year early, then after that got another degree, chemistry I think from somewhere else. Or maybe chemistry was from Oxford…..**** all common sense though!

As an all rounder, my mate Pete. Just gets stuff. He works in insolvency.

I agree that a PHD etc is not the only market of being intelligent, but I imagine a lot of people with “huge brains” will have incidentally picked up some certificates along the way.

Sometimes those without formal qualifications are much more interesting and have less niche knowledge though.

I’ve gone out on the ale with a few Nobel prize winners and plenty of other scientists at that level – all are obviously very bright at the minimum, but it’s not all brain-that-can-boil water stuff. They come in different shapes and sizes like anything else – great communicators, towering intellects, inspirational research Leaders etc – rarely all of these in one person. The most distinguishing thing is a sort of intellectual fearlessness to challenge the rules of science, backed up with an absolutely relentless work ethic to make it happen. They often have huge knowledge (some do not) but it is incidental – you don’t change the course of science by knowing a lot of stuff.

Personally find genuine clinician scientists to be extremely impressive. Most are not as they’re spread way too thin, often masked with comedy levels of arrogance (I mean you need huge self-belief to do anything in science, so arrogance is not unheard of, but medicine is just in a different league here). Worked with a couple of guys, though, would do their consultant rounds of the wards in the morning and then could sit in on research project meetings with complete command of the overall scientific picture. Not at the absolute technical level but still with insight and could problem solve – this takes big intellectual firepower.

There’s a theme here.

For me, the most intelligent famous people I’ve met would be either Hannah Fry, or Jon Snow (the former CH4 news presenter). Both very smart people!

Outside of famous people…? Well my 1st serious GF was a bit smart… English literature graduate from Oxford, she was like a walking talking dictionary! She would use words that she genuinely knew the meanings of just to confuse me at times, and my vocabulary is far greater than most…

My sister though! Christ… 9 A*’s and 2 A’s at GCSE level, 4 A’s at A level, a 1st in History from Oxford… No common sense whatsoever though! But then she tells me she feels thick compared to her boyfriend who is an off the chart geek computer programmer! 🤷🏻‍♂️

My youngest step brother is another one… Not seen him in a few years (2 sides of the family drifted apart when my Dad divorced his mum), but recently found out he’s the brains behind an alternative energy company specialising in Hydrogen which didn’t surprise me at all. Doctorate in some sort of advanced geology, one of few people in the world at a certain level of qualification as he is apparently… Not surprising when you consider his dad was a Nuclear power station designer, and one of only about a dozen in the world qualified to do so! He was always a very humble young man (he’ll be 35 soon) too, all he wanted to be when he was a kid was a footballer (because he was mad about football, not interested in the money). The irony is that the company he is the brains behind is valued at about £600m, and though he only owns 1/8th of it as he had to get the funding sourced to get it off the ground, that still means he’s worth about £70m which is far more than he could have earnt as a footballer! 😂

A life long friend is a head teacher, member of mensa with an iq of 148.

I always thought MENSA entry was a minimum 150 IQ…? 🤷🏻‍♂️ Either way, I’m 144 here and know many, many people smarter than myself… I’m “the thick one” from my family after all! 😂

I don’t think he’s that clever, but…he has an absolutely incredible memory. Not saying it’s photographic, but he can recall in detail things from school, etc.

He’s good at remembering stuff… I can recall incredible details about things that happened in my childhood, remember the registration numbers of my fathers’ cars when growing up (as well as their models, specs, engine power etc.), but I can’t remember somebody’s name 30 seconds after being introduced to them! Damned if I can remember some of my riding mates’ names sometimes even!!! It’s quite embarrassing at times…

The only problem being that his EQ was very low so he was often very difficult to deal with

It’s quite rare that IQ and EQ go hand in hand for sure… Which makes it all the more impressive when they do!

The clever kids had BBC micros?