Edie Stern On List of All-Time Smartest People

Edie Stern is #26 on Libb Thims’ list of the 40 smartest people of all time reports Business Insider.

Stern is a well-known club, con and zine fan — past chair of SFSFS, head of the 1992 Worldcon program division, co-editor of the SFSFS Shuttle and Shadow of a Fan.

Stern also has over 100 patents to her name. Her professional honors include the Kate Gleason Award, presented during ASME’s 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.

Thims evaluated both IQ and accomplishments to rank the smartest people in history, a result arrived at after indexing these capabilities in numerous ways.

Albert Einstein is #2 on his list. Johann Goethe, considered by Einstein to be “the last man in the world to know everything,” is #1.

 [Thanks to Owen Whiteoak for the story.]

7 thoughts on “Edie Stern On List of All-Time Smartest People

  1. Interesting list — I hadn’t known that Edie’s father treated her the way John Stuart Mills (also on the list) was treated by his. (Different functions, but same intense approach, e.g., Mill complained at age 10 that he’d written only a little in Greek because his other studies took up too much time.) I wonder how many others on the list were pressure-cooked like that vs how many were ]naturals[

  2. A couple of notes. Edie is the highest ranking living woman on the list and the fourth highest ranking living person on the list.

  3. It’s interesting to note who’s missing from the list. Stephen Hawking is conspicuous by his absence. Also Paul Erd?s.
    I met one of the other people on the list, when he was about 3 or 4 years old, at a folk festival, and had dinner with him and his parents. He was carrying a stuffed toy rabbit, and with just a little prompting from his mother, a child psychologist, he explained to us that Fluffy was a “transitional object”, and then did a good job of explaining what that meant.

  4. Chip – Edie understandably tries to keep her background low-key but now that the cat is out of the bag, I feel ok with mentioning that you can find more info about her father’s methods by searching for “Edith project”

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