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Synectics Survey of Contemporary Genius 2007

A report that examines the concept of genius and attempts to list the

top 100 geniuses alive in the world today.

Published October 29th 2007

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else

and thinking something different.”

Albert Sent-Gyorgi

Synectics is a global consulting business that helps the world's most admired

organisations create and implement breakthrough ideas. Whether it is the

creation of new products or services, or the re-invention of an entire

organisation, Synectics helps create superior results by harnessing the creativity

and energy of its clients’ own people.

As pioneers in the field of organisational creativity, Synectics was set up in the

1960s and has helped hundreds of the world's leading companies to succeed in

their goals. Unlike many innovation agencies its methods are based on a robust

body of knowledge and is the result of 45 years of continuous action research.

You can find out more about Synectics at www.synecticsworld.com

www.synecticsworld.com II

What makes a genius a genius?

Everybody, even non-scientists, knows that Steven Hawking is a

genius.

But what is it about Steven Hawking that makes him a genius?

Can his genius be compared to the genius of others? Is he more

or less of a genius than Zinedine Zidane? Is Zinedine Zidane a

genius at all? Who else is a genius?

These are the questions that are examined in this short report.

The more that I have pondered on genius, the more I have

become convinced that it holds a great secret. It certainly

fascinates us. And, for many it is the greatest accolade that can

be attributed to a person.

There are some who say that genius can be created. I am not so

certain. But I am certain that the process of thought that arrives

at genius ideas can be re-created. I have seen it happen in some

of the work that Synectics has done with its clients.

Genius and creativity are bound inextricably together and,

therefore, genius and the work of Synectics is also closely

related. It is our bread and butter.

And so Synectics has attempted the impossible. It has attempted

to define and quantify what it is that makes a genius. And

through that definition it has arrived at a list of the top 100 living

geniuses.

Whether or not you agree with the results…

Nigel Clarke

Managing Partner

Synectics UK & Europe

www.synecticsworld.com III

Defining genius

This report attempts to define what it is that makes a genius and

to use that to create a scoring system that can be used to rank

individuals according to their ‘genius factor’. The end objective is

the compilation of a ranked list of 100 contemporary, living

geniuses.

What is genius

Genius is a very difficult concept to define. Most people would be

able to name a couple of people who they think would qualify as

a genius. But they may find it more difficult to agree with each

other when comparing lists. Genius is not easily quantified.

How do we know that Leonardo De Vinci is a genius? Is it

because of his phenomenal talent? Is it to do with his lifetime

achievement? Is it the recognition that has accumulated over the

years? Is it about the impact that he has had on the world. Or is

it something about the great advances that he brought to the

world. Advances that made the world a different place.

Synectics believes that it is a combination of all the above.

Paradigm Shifting

Many people argue that a genius can be defined by their

contribution, where it turns conventional thinking on its head.

Einstein’s theories of relativity led to a total re-assessment of the

Newtonian approach to understanding the physical world.

Benjamin Franklin’s investigations into electricity ushered in a

new era in metropolitan living. Abu Ali ibn Sen� (Avicenna), a

Mu'tazili philosopher and doctor in the early 11th century, is

regarded as the father of modern medicine. All three, and many

others, are regarded as geniuses because their thinking and

their work led to a complete re-appraisal of everything that had

gone before.

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Popular Acclaim

Others are held up as geniuses as a result of the extent of their

influence and their hold upon the public imagination. These men

and women need not be the most original thinkers or have the

highest IQ’s. They certainly need not lay claim to having moved

the world on its axis. And yet they have had a great impact. Was

Elvis Presley a genius? Millions of men and women would argue

that he was. How about Ghandi or JRR Tolkein or Charlie

Chaplin? If genius is a socially defined concept, then the

opinions of millions of human beings cannot and should not be

ignored.

Intellectual Power

Pure intellect is often held up as the true indicator of genius. 20th

century psychological techniques have given us the IQ or

Intelligent Quotient and many would argue that those with the

very highest IQs are geniuses by definition. Kim Ung-Yong, a

Korean former child prodigy, has the highest IQ recorded at 210.

Does that make him a genius? NASA did not think so. IQ scores

of 140 or more are often quoted as genius or near genius levels.

Famous people from the world of film with very high recorded

IQs include James Woods (180), Sharon Stone (154) and

Quentin Tarantino (160). Does that mean that they are geniuses

and Francis Crick (117), a Nobel Prize winner who unlocked the

mysteries of DNA, is not?

Achievement

There is no genius without great achievement. It is imposible to

recognise genius without achievement. Some would even argue

that it is achievement itself that defines genius, although that

may be taking it too far. Robert Oppenheimer was responsible

for building the first atomic bomb. It was this bomb that took

thousands of Japanese lives, brought World War Two to an early

conclusion and ushered in the cold fear of armageddon politics.

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The building of this terrible weapon was, without a doubt, a truly

great achievement. It had eluded Germany and the Soviet

Union. But was Robert Oppenheimer a genius? Alexander the

Great was a military prodigy and conquered all the known world

from Europe to India and all in between. Great cities were

named after him. Historians still pore over his tactics of war.

Was he a genius too? Surely achievements as great as his could

not be ignored in the search for genius. There are many other

examples of men and women who have achieved great things.

The difficulty will always be sorting the geniuses from the rest.

Any assessment of genius can ill afford to ignore task.

Cultural Importance

Genius is not always reconised in a person’s lifetime. Vincent

Van Gogh died unknown and in poverty, but his work has

become a testament to his genius for art. It has become an

indelible part of the narrative that weaves our understanding of

C20th Western culture and individual pieces exchange hands for

hundreds of millions of pounds. Culture is humanity’s great work

and any individual who makes an important contribution to it

deserves to be considered as a potential genius. Here is the

contribution of philosophy and the arts. Homer, St Paul,

Confucius, Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hegel, Marx,

Kafka, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein… The list is impressive and long.

It is, of course, the assessment of all these five factors together

that helps us to conclude on the existence or lack of genius for

any named individual. And it is these five factors that stand at

the heart of the Synectics analysis of contemporary living genius.

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How the list was compiled and ranked

In August 2007, Synectics emailed 4,000 known people in the

UK and asked them to nominate up to ten people who were alive

and who they considered to qualify as a genius. The email

contained a straight request for nominations without

qualification. No other guidance was given.

Just over 600 replies were received containing nominations for

approximately 1100 discrete individuals. Of these only 60% were

still alive. Another 120 proved impossible to identify or were

found to be self-nominations. These were discounted. Thus

Synectics was in possession of a long list that numbered over

400 people. Nominated individuals came from all walks of life.

The world of sport and popular culture accounted for a high

number of them. Over 60 percent of them came from the USA

and the UK.

Synectics assembled a panel of six people with expertise in the

fields of creativity and innovation. The panel was charged with

the responsibility for ranking the long list in order of genius and

to present a resulting shortlist of 100.

The panel took five predefined characteristics of genius;

Paradigm Shifting , Popular Acclaim, Intellectual Power , Achievement and Cultural Importance. Each of the individuals in the long list were then scored out of

ten for each of the five factors. The total score (maximum 50,

minimum 0) was then compiled for each individual under the

label of ‘genius factor’

The top 100 scoring individuals were then ranked from the

highest ranked (with a genius factor of 27/50) to the 100th

ranked (with a genius factor of 2/50)

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The Findings

Top Twenty Living Geniuses (*)

1=. Albert Hofmann (born January 11, 1906) is a Swiss scientist best known for synthesizing Lysergic acid diethylamide. Hofmann has authored more than 100 scientific articles and has written a number of books, including LSD: My Problem Child. On January 11, 2006, Hofmann became a centenarian, and was the focus of an international symposium on LSD. Through the late 1940s and most of the 1950s, LSD caused a revolution in psychiatry. Therapists and doctors used it to treat forms of mental illness, including neurosis, psychosis and depression. More than 40,000 people underwent psychedelic therapy. Respected figures considered it a wonder drug and gave their careers over to LSD research. Some believed it gave a glimpse into the way schizophrenics perceived the world. Others used it as a catalyst to accelerate traditional psychotherapy - and even took the drug themselves along with their patients. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. He believes that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed, although he concedes LSD can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Genius Factor 27 Paradigm Shifter 5, Popular Acclaim, 4, Intellectual Power 6, Achievement 4, Cultural Importance 8

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1=. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, OM, KBE,

FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955) is a British developer who together with Robert Cailliau invented the World Wide Web. Sir Timothy Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (which oversees its continued development), and a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE. After leaving CERN, in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." He wrote his initial proposal in March of 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NEXTSTEP) and the first Web server called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol Genius Factor 27 Paradigm Shifter 7, Popular Acclaim, 4, Intellectual Power 2, Achievement 6, Cultural Importance 8

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3. George Soros (born August 12, 1930, in Budapest,

Hungary, as György Schwartz) is an American financial speculator, stock investor, philanthropist, and political activist. Currently, he is the chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute and is also a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. His support for the Solidarity labor movement in Poland, as well as the Czechoslovakian human rights organization Charter 77, contributed to ending Soviet Union political dominance in those countries. His funding and organization of Georgia's Rose Revolution was considered by Russian and Western observers to have been crucial to its success, although Soros said his role has been "greatly exaggerated." In the United States, he is known for having donated large sums of money in a failed effort to defeat President George W. Bush's bid for re-election in 2004. Soros is famously known for "breaking the Bank of England" on Black Wednesday in 1992. With an estimated current net worth of around $8.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 80th-richest person in the world.


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4. Matthew Abram Groening (born February 15,

1954 in Portland, Oregon; is an Emmy Award-winning American

cartoonist and the creator of The Simpsons, Futurama and the weekly comic strip Life in Hell.

Matt Groening has been nominated for 25 Emmy awards and has won ten: nine for The Simpsons and one for Futurama.

[29]

Groening received the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for 2002, and had been nominated for the same award in 2000. He received a British Comedy Award for "outstanding contribution to comedy" in 2004.


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5=. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (born 18 July

1918) is the former President of South Africa, and the first to be elected in fully representative democratic elections. Before his presidency, Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. He spent nearly three decades in prison for his struggle against apartheid. Through his 27 years in prison, much of it spent in a cell on Robben Island, Mandela became the most widely known figure in the struggle against apartheid. Among opponents of apartheid in South Africa and internationally, he became a cultural icon as a proponent of freedom and equality while the apartheid government and nations sympathetic to it condemned him and the ANC as communists and terrorists.

Following his release from prison in 1990, his switch to a policy of reconciliation and negotiation helped lead the transition to multi-racial democracy in South Africa. Since the end of apartheid, he has been widely praised, even among white South Africans and former opponents. Mandela has received more than one hundred awards over four decades, most notably the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. He is currently a celebrated elder statesman who continues to voice his opinion on topical issues.


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5=. Dr Frederick Sanger, OM, CH, CBE, FRS (born

13 August 1918) is an English biochemist and a two times Nobel laureate in chemistry. He is the fourth person in the world to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes (first three were Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen), and the only person to receive both in chemistry.

Sanger determined the complete amino acid sequence of insulin in 1955. In doing so, he proved that proteins have definite structures. It was this achievement that earned him his first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958.

In 1975, he developed the chain termination method of DNA sequencing, also known as the Dideoxy termination method or the Sanger method. Two years later he used his technique to successfully sequence the genome of the Phage -X174; the first fully sequenced DNA-based genome. He did this entirely by hand. This has been of key importance in such projects as the Human Genome Project and earned him his second Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1980, together with Walter Gilbert.


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7=. Dario Fo (born March 24, 1926) is an Italian satirist,

playwright, theatre director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. His dramatic work employs comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the proletarian classes. He currently owns and operates a theatre company with his wife and leading actress Franca Rame.

In his works Dario Fo has criticized — among others — Catholic policy on abortion, political murders, organized crime, political corruption and the Middle East crisis. His plays often depend on improvisation, commedia dell'arte style. His plays — especially Mistero Buffo — have been translated to 30 languages and when they are performed outside Italy, they are often modified to reflect local political and other issues.


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7=. Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS,

FRSA, (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the runaway popular science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.

His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical discovery that black holes emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation, or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.


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9=. Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (born December 15, 1907) is a Brazilian architect who is considered one of the most important names in international modern architecture. He was a pioneer in the exploration of the constructive possibilities of reinforced concrete.

Although he was a defender of utilitarianism, his creations did not have the blocky coldness frequently criticized by post-modern critics. His buildings have forms so dynamic and curves so sensual that many admirers say that, more than an architect, he is a sculptor of monuments.

He was the architect of the majority of buildings in Brazilia, including the residence of the President (Palácio da Alvorada), the House of the deputy, the National Congress, the Cathedral of Brasília (a hyperboloid structure), diverse ministries, not to mention residential buildings. Viewed from above, the city can be seen to have elements that repeat themselves in every building, giving it a formal unity. Behind the construction of Brasília lay a monumental campaign to construct an entire city in the barren center of the country, hundreds of kilometers from any major city. Genius Factor 21 Paradigm Shifter 2, Popular Acclaim, 1, Intellectual Power 4, Achievement 8, Cultural Importance 6

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9=. Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an Academy

Award-nominated American composer. His music is frequently described as minimalist, though he prefers the term theatre composer. He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late-20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public.

Glass is extremely prolific as a composer: he has written ensemble works, operas, symphonies, concertos, film scores, and solo works. Glass counts many visual artists, writers, musicians, and directors among his friends, including Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Doris Lessing, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Wilson, John Moran, actor Bill Treacher, Godfrey Reggio, Ravi Shankar, David Bowie, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, and electronic musician Aphex Twin, who have all collaborated with him.

He is a strong supporter of the Tibetan cause. In 1987 he co-founded the Tibet House with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere. Glass lives in New York and in Nova Scotia. Genius Factor 21 Paradigm Shifter 6, Popular Acclaim, 4, Intellectual Power 2, Achievement 5, Cultural Importance 5

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9=. Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, born 13 June

1966 in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), sometimes known as Grisha Perelman, is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology. In particular, he has proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture. This solves in the affirmative the famous Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904 and regarded as one of the most important and difficult open problems in mathematics. In August 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal, for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow". The Fields Medal is widely considered to be the top honor a mathematician can receive. However, he declined to accept the award or appear at the congress. On December 22, 2006, the journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré Conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year," the first such recognition in the area of mathematics. Genius Factor 21 Paradigm Shifter 2, Popular Acclaim, 2, Intellectual Power 10, Achievement 7, Cultural Importance 0

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12=. Sir Andrew John Wiles (born April 11, 1953) is

a British-American research mathematician at Princeton University, specialising in number theory. He is most famous for solving Fermat's Last Theorem.

Andrew Wiles' most famous mathematical result is that all rational semistable elliptic curves are modular which, in particular, implies Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles was introduced to Fermat's Last Theorem at the age of ten. He tried to prove the theorem using textbook methods and later studied the work of mathematicians who had tried to prove it. When he began his graduate studies he stopped trying to prove it and began studying elliptic curves under the supervision of John Coates.

Later at Princeton University, dedicated his research to the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, though of course he did continue in his teaching duties at; continuing to attend seminars, lecture undergraduates, and give tutorials.


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12=. Li Hongzhi (born in 1952 in Gongzhuling city, Jilin,

China) is the founder of Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa), a purported system of "mind-body cultivation" related to the qigong tradition.

Li Hongzhi introduced Falun Dafa on May 13, 1992 at the fifth middle school in Changchun, Jilin. From 1992 to 1994 he travelled throughout China, giving lectures and teaching Falun Gong exercises. In 1999 the Chinese government estimated the number of Falun Gong practitioners to be approximately 70 million. Since July 1999, the Chinese government has conducted a widespread persecution of Falun Gong. Today, he lives in New York City, United States.


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12=. Ali Javan (born December 26, 1926 in Tehran, Iran)

is an Iranian inventor and physicist at MIT. He co-invented the gas laser in 1960, with William R. Bennett.

Ali Javan tested his "Gas Laser" invention on December 12, 1960. The following day, he conducted the first experiment of a telephone conversation ever to be transmitted by laser beam. Nearly 40 years later, laser telecommunication via fiber optics is commonplace, comprising the key technology used in today's Internet. The laser is, perhaps, one of the greatest inventions in today's technology. Javan is still intensely involved with inventions, concentrating on the use of matter at "nano-scale", specifically working on electronics at optical frequencies. He anticipates the day when microchips will operate on light wave frequencies GHz (Giga-Hertz) rather than the radio frequencies of MHz (Mega-Hertz).


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15=. Brian Eno (born Brian Peter George St. John le

Baptiste de la Salle Eno on 15 May 1948 in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England) is an English electronic musician, music theorist and record producer. As a solo artist, he is probably best known as the father of modern ambient music, though he is also a highly celebrated record producer.

With an art school background and inspiration from minimalism, Eno first came to prominence as the keyboard and synthesizer player of the 1970s glam and art rock band Roxy Music. After leaving the group, Eno recorded four highly idiosyncratic and original rock albums, before turning to more abstract soundscapes on records such as Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1/Music for Airports (1978). Since then he has made dozens of albums, many with similarly-minded collaborators such as Harold Budd, Cluster, John Cale, David Byrne and Robert Fripp. Eno is also notable for introducing the concepts of chance music to pop and rock and roll. Eno has pursued several artistic ventures parallel to his music career, including visual art installations, and, with artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards recommending various artistic strategies.


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15=. Damien Hirst (born June 7, 1965) is an English

artist and the most prominent of the group that has been dubbed "Young British Artists" (or YBAs). He dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s and is internationally renowned.

Death is a central theme in his work. He is best known for his Natural History series, in which dead animals (such as a shark, a sheep or a cow) are preserved, sometimes cut-up, in formaldehyde. His iconic work is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Its sale in 2004 made him the second most expensive living artist after Jasper Johns. In June 2007, Hirst became the most expensive living artist with the sale of a medicine chest, Lullaby Spring, for £9.65 million at Sotheby's in London. On 30 August 2007, Hirst outdid his previous sale of Lullaby Spring with For The Love of God, which sold for £50 million to an unknown investment group. Genius Factor 19 Paradigm Shifter 6, Popular Acclaim, 6, Intellectual Power 0, Achievement 3, Cultural Importance 4

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15=. Daniel Paul Tammet (b. January 31, 1979;

London, England) is a British autistic savant, gifted with a facility for mathematics problems, sequence memory, and natural language learning. He was born with congenital childhood epilepsy.

Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented form of synesthesia, but the detail and specificity of Tammet's mental imagery of numbers is unique. In his mind, he says, each number up to 10,000 has its own unique shape and feel, that he can "see" results of calculations as landscapes, and that he can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful.

[1] Tammet not only

verbally describes these visions, but also creates artwork, particularly watercolor paintings, such as his painting of Pi. Tammet speaks a variety of languages including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh and Esperanto. He particularly likes Estonian, because it is rich in vowels. Tammet is creating a new language called Mänti. Mänti has many features related to Finnish and Estonian, both of which are Finno-ugric languages. Some sources credit Tammet as creating the Uusisuom and Lapsi languages as well.


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18.Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is a

contemporary American novelist, whose writings focus on minute inspection of the narrator's stream of thought. His unconventional novels deal with topics like voyeurism and planned assassination, but generally de-emphasize traditional aspects of plot.

Apart from writing novels, Baker has been a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library sending thousands of books to a landfill, the elimination of card catalogs, and the destruction of old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997 Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of his efforts.


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19. Daniel Barenboim (b. November 15, 1942) is a

pianist and conductor. He lives in Berlin and holds citizenship in Argentina, Israel, and Spain. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; his parents were Russian Ashkenazi Jews.

Barenboim first came to fame as a pianist but now is as well-known as a conductor, and for his work with an orchestra of young Arab and Jewish musicians, based in Seville, Spain, called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded with the late Palestinian American intellectual and activist Edward Said, whom Barenboim has called his best friend. Barenboim has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli settlements and of Israel's government since Rabin, and supporter of Palestinian rights. In 2001, he sparked a controversy in Israel by conducting the music of Wagner in concert, as had not been done in Israel since 1938, and was informally taboo.


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20=. Robert Dennis Crumb (born August 30, 1943),

often credited simply as R. Crumb, is an American artist and illustrator recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream. He currently lives in France.

Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded as its most prominent figure. Though one of the most celebrated of comic book artists, Crumb's entire career has unfolded outside the mainstream comic book publishing industry. One of his most recognized works is the Keep on Truckin' drawing, which became a widely distributed fixture of pop culture in the 1970s. Others are the characters Devil Girl, Fritz the Cat, and Mr. Natural.

Genius Factor 16 Paradigm Shifter 4, Popular Acclaim, 5, Intellectual Power 0, Achievement 3, Cultural Importance 4 (*) All description of the above individuals are taken from public sources and are based, primarily, on entries available on Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com)

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Full table of the top 100 Living geniuses as identified and ranked by Synectics.

(Synectics Survey of Contemporary Genius 2007)

Rank Name Nation Field Score

1= Albert Hoffman (Swiss) Chemist (27)

1= Tim Berners-Lee (British) Computer Scientist (27)

3 George Soros (American) Investor & Philanthropist (25)

4 Matt Groening (American) Satirist & Animator (24)

5= Nelson Mandela (South

African)

Politician & Diplomat (23)

5= Frederick Sanger (British) Chemist (23)

7= Dario Fo (Italian) Writer & Dramatist (22)

7= Steven Hawking (British) Physicist (22)

9= Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian) Architect (21)

9= Philip Glass (American) Composer (21)

9= Grigory Perelman (Russian) Mathematician (21)

12= Andrew Wiles (British) Mathematician (20)

12= Li Hongzhi (Chinese) Spiritual Leader (20)

12= Ali Javan (Iranian) Engineer (20)

15= Brian Eno (British) Composer (19)

15= Damian Hirst (British) Artist (19)

15= Daniel Tammet (British) Savant & Linguist (19)

18 Nicholson Baker (American Writer (18)

19 Daniel Barenboim (N/A) Musician (17)

20= Robert Crumb (American) Artist (16)

20= Richard Dawkins (British) Biologist and philosopher (16)

20= Larry Page &

Sergey Brin

(American) Publishers (16)

20= Rupert Murdoch (American) Publisher (16)

20= Geoffrey Hill (British) Poet (16)

25 Garry Kasparov (Russian) Chess Player (15)

26= The Dalai Lama (Tibetan) Spiritual Leader (14)

26= Steven Spielberg (American) Film maker (14)

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26= Hiroshi Ishiguro (Japanese) Roboticist (14)

26= Robert Edwards (British) Pioneer of IVF treatment (14)

26= Seamus Heaney (Irish) Poet (14)

31 Harold Pinter (British) Writer & Dramatist (13)

32= Flossie Wong-

Staal

(Chinese) Bio-technologist (12)

32= Bobby Fischer (American) Chess Player (12)

32= Prince (American) Musician (12)

32= Henrik Gorecki (Polish) Composer (12)

32= Avram Noam

Chomski

(American) Philosopher & linguist (12)

32= Sebastian Thrun (German) Probabilistic roboticist (12)

32= Nima Arkani

Hamed

(Canadian) Physicist (12)

32= Margaret Turnbull (American) Astrobiologist (12)

40= Elaine Pagels (American) Historian (11)

40= Enrique Ostrea (Philippino) Pediatrics & neonatology (11)

40= Gary Becker (American) Economist (11)

43= Mohammed Ali (American) Boxer (10)

43= Osama Bin Laden (Saudi) Islamicist (10)

43= Bill Gates (American) Businessman (10)

43= Philip Roth (American) Writer (10)

43= James West (American) Invented the foil electrical

microphone

(10)

43= Tuan Vo-Dinh (Vietnamese) Bio-Medical Scientist (10)

49= Brian Wilson (American) Musician (9)

49= Stevie Wonder (American) Singer songwriter (9)

49= Vint Cerf (American) Computer scientist (9)

49= Henry Kissinger (American) Diplomat and politician (9)

49= Richard Branson (British) Publicist (9)

49= Pardis Sabeti (Iranian) Biological anthropologist (9)

49= Jon de Mol (Dutch) Television producer (9)

49= Meryl Streep (American) Actress (9)

49= Margaret Attwood (Canadian) Writer (9)

58= Placido Domingo (Spanish) Singer (8)

58= John Lasseter (American) Digital Animator (8)

58= Shunpei

Yamazaki

(Japanese) Computer scientist &

physicist

(8)

www.synecticsworld.com XXIX

58= Jane Goodall (British) Ethologist & Anthropologist (8)

58= Kirti Narayan

Chaudhuri

(Indian) Historian (8)

58= John Goto (British) Photographer (8)

58= Paul McCartney (British) Musician (8)

58= Stephen King (American) Writer (8)

58= Leonard Cohen (American) Poet & musician (8)

67= Aretha Franklin (American) Musician (7)

67= David Bowie (British) Musician (7)

67= Emily Oster (American) Economist (7)

67= Steve Wozniak (American) Engineer and co-founder of

Apple Computers

(7)

67= Martin Cooper (American) Inventor of the cell phone (7)

72= George Lucas (American) Film maker (6)

72= Niles Rogers (American) Musician (6)

72= Hans Zimmer (German) Composer (6)

72= John Williams (American) Composer (6)

72= Annette Baier (New

Zealander)

Philosopher (6)

72= Dorothy Rowe (British) Psychologist (6)

72= Ivan Marchuk (Ukrainian) Artist & sculptor (6)

72= Robin Escovado (American) Composer (6)

72= Mark Dean (American) Inventor & computer

scientist

(6)

72= Rick Rubin (American) Musician & producer (6)

72= Stan Lee (American) Publisher (6)

83= David Warren (Australian) Engineer (5)

83= Jon Fosse (Norwegian) Writer & dramatist

83= Gjertrud

Schnackenberg

(American) Poet (5)

83= Graham Linehan (Irish) Writer & dramatist (5)

83= JK Rowling (British) Writer (5)

83= Ken Russell (British) Film maker (5)

83= Mikhail

Timofeyevich

Kalashnikov

(Russian) Small arms designer (5)

83= Erich Jarvis (American) Neurobiologist (5)

91=. Chad Varah (British) Founder of Samaritans (4)

www.synecticsworld.com XXX

91= Nicolas Hayek (Swiss) Businessman and founder

of Swatch

(4)

91= Alastair Hannay (British) Philosopher (4)

94= Patricia Bath (American) Ophthalmologist

94= Thomas A.

Jackson

(American) Aerospace engineer (3)

94= Dolly Parton (American) Singer (3)

94= Morissey (British) Singer (3)

94= Michael Eavis (British) Organiser of Glastonbury (3)

94= Ranulph Fiennes (British) Adventurer (3)

100=. Quentin

Tarantino

(American) Filmmaker (2)

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