I also forgot to mention Niels Henrik Abel in this thread. Untimely death if there was ever one, one can only wonder what this kid would have accomplished had his overwhelming genious had the chance to flourish for longer.
what's the general fascination of John Nash about? i know the name but nothing of his accomplishments, wouldn't have expected so many mentions in a thread like this. it's not like he invented calculus or something...
Turing is really cool, conducted some crazy creative experiments. i just checked his wiki; sad sad story. he was 'treated' for homosexuality while it was still illegal in the uk, process was called 'chemical castration', and was pretty much an injection or something of female hormones. another young genius dead in his early 40s too... there seem to be a lot of those.
what's the general fascination of John Nash about? i know the name but nothing of his accomplishments, wouldn't have expected so many mentions in a thread like this. it's not like he invented calculus or something...
nash equilibrium is probably the most central concept in game theory and he formalized the existence of them. and game theory is basically the study of strategic interaction which has largely become a very integral area of study in economics, computer science, and even biology. Nash's papers are definitely among the highest cited academic papers.
leibniz does deserve a lot more recognition for inventing calculus tho, especially for using convenient notations that didn't set the math world back a few decade
it's sort of a point of shame for me how little i actually know about game theory. every so often i stumble upon a concept, wiki it, get the gist, move on... and afterwards realize that in at least some remote way i already understood the essentials of whatever i had looked up... just not in the language of the field or anywhere close to the depth. but i should probably verse myself in the basics a little more. the joint use of a methodology both to describe competitive/social/whatever interaction and f*cking 0s and 1s of computer science has always boggled my mind.
i know leibniz was a real renaissance man but i've only really heard offhand about his philosophy... the, uhh, 'monads'. really really really kooky. for a guy that smart, obviously there was a lot of merit to his system, but it's the building of the metaphysical system in the first place -- as if it's going to be that much better than any other supposedly comprehensive allencompassing system that came before it -- that makes me laugh. these guys were soooo into themselves. lol
Re: Your favorite intellect
