In grad school, when I first began to seriously read Aristotle in Greek, my feeling was that he was the smartest person I’d ever read. It’s humbling to encounter an ancient thinker in their own idiom & truly experience the fact that they were every bit as capable as us. https://t.co/X3VmxF5I2i

— jonstokes.(com|eth) (@jonst0kes) May 7, 2022

I can’t read ancient Greek and I’m not that much into Aristotle, but I think Archimedes was likely the smartest human being to ever live. I don’t think it’s even that close.

Any one of the things Archimedes did would make someone a genius; old Archy did dozens of them in all sorts of disparate fields. It’s like if someone today solved fusion while moonlighting as a chip designer with a side hustle as a SpaceX lead space flight engineer, all while winning a Nobel prize in physics in a completely separate field than all of those other pursuits.

With the possible exception of von Neumann, there has never been another human like Archimedes.