Another Southie genius

by doofus_maximus Fri Jun 07, 2013 5:35 pm

has an IQ of 162, more than Hawking/Einstein. but only 12 13 years old.

by MaxEntropy_Man Fri Jun 07, 2013 5:51 pm

when people mention intelligence they always mention einstein and hawking. another name that doesn't have the same public name recognition but belongs right up there IMO is paul dirac. i have known him from my technical reading, but currently reading a biography. definitely a genius and as strange as they come.

by goodcitizn Fri Jun 07, 2013 6:08 pm

This girl seems quite modest and down to earth in the interview. Speaks well of her parenting too.

by Rishi Fri Jun 07, 2013 6:25 pm

She said that if you do not use your IQ to achieve something then there is no point in having it.

I think it is judgemental.

Marilyn Vos Savant who dropped out of college did not use her Mensa level IQ to achieve anything except answer some puzzles on the Parade magazine.

by Marathadi-Saamiyaar Fri Jun 07, 2013 6:41 pm

Rishi wrote:She said that if you do not use your IQ to achieve something then there is no point in having it.

I think it is judgemental.

Marilyn Vos Savant who dropped out of college did not use her Mensa level IQ to achieve anything except answer some puzzles on the Parade magazine.

Then she waster it...just like that girl said ... so you just agreed with the girl while disagreeing.

by garam_kuta Fri Jun 07, 2013 7:47 pm

doofus_maximus wrote:has an IQ of 162, more than Hawking/Einstein. but only 12 13 years old.

here is someone with an IQ over 195

you could read his story in malcom gladwell's outliers

by Kayalvizhi Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:19 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote: paul dirac..

Who is he? How many know of him? Is he the one who introduced dirac function?

by MaxEntropy_Man Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:29 pm

Kayalvizhi wrote:
MaxEntropy_Man wrote: paul dirac..

Who is he? How many know of him? Is he the one who introduced dirac function?

yes the very same. the person who introduced the dirac delta function. i don't know how many know of him, but surely anyone who has studied an ounce of quantum mechanics surely knows him. he introduced the use of matrix transformations in quantum mechanics and a simplified notation that makes computing expectation values of physical quantities in QM awfully simple. one of the central figures in twentieth century physics.

on a personal level he is said to have been very strange, but people now think he may have been autistic.

by pravalika nanda Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:41 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:
Kayalvizhi wrote:
MaxEntropy_Man wrote: paul dirac..

Who is he? How many know of him? Is he the one who introduced dirac function?

yes the very same. the person who introduced the dirac delta function. i don't know how many know of him, but surely anyone who has studied an ounce of quantum mechanics surely knows him. he introduced the use of matrix transformations in quantum mechanics and a simplified notation that makes computing expectation values of physical quantities in QM awfully simple. one of the central figures in twentieth century physics.

on a personal level he is said to have been very strange, but people now think he may have been autistic.

** I was reading up on him (on wiki), he seems to have been a quiet individual, but he was highly-functional. He did go to trade school, he was happily married - there's a picture of him with his wife and he looks comfortable with her, he had healthy social interactions, he did have views on other things such as religion. The man did not like poetry (neither do I) and he didn't know how to talk to women (a condition peculiar to several men) but from the outside he doesn't seem to have been an autistic-savant. I suspect there are people with autistic-savant children or relatives who'd like to console themselves that most geniuses suffered from a-s but this guy doesn't seem that way, based on my lay knowledge of autism.

by MaxEntropy_Man Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:43 pm

trade school? he is one of the most celebrated theoretical physicists of all time who unraveled many mysteries of the universe.

by pravalika nanda Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:49 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:trade school? he is one of the most celebrated theoretical physicists of all time who unraveled many mysteries of the universe.

** this is what I got on him from wiki:
"Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School^[15] and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Technical College (later Cotham School), where his father was a French teacher.^[16] The school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol, which shared grounds and staff.^[17] It emphasised technical subjects like bricklaying, shoemaking and metal work, and modern languages."

** trade school ain't so bad, if he wanted to, he could've gone on to become a surgeon if he was using his hands all the time. he did eventually go to Cambridge on scholarship.

by MaxEntropy_Man Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:55 pm

pravalika nanda wrote:
** trade school ain't so bad, if he wanted to, he could've gone on to become a surgeon if he was using his hands all the time.

thank god for that! he only used his hands to write mathematical equations not for brick laying or wielding the scalpel.

by pravalika nanda Fri Jun 07, 2013 10:08 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:
pravalika nanda wrote:
** trade school ain't so bad, if he wanted to, he could've gone on to become a surgeon if he was using his hands all the time.

thank god for that! he only used his hands to write mathematical equations not for brick laying or wielding the scalpel.

** surgeons do have a reputation for being non-thinkers, but there is place on the planet for these lowly creatures. imagine if your beloved dirac got a tummy-ache and needed an appendectomy; or what if he didn't like his nose and wanted a rhinoplasty? wouldn't he have wanted that skilled surgeon who cuts and sews so well that others will come to admire his scars?

by Rishi Fri Jun 07, 2013 10:39 pm

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:
Rishi wrote:She said that if you do not use your IQ to achieve something then there is no point in having it.

I think it is judgemental.

Marilyn Vos Savant who dropped out of college did not use her Mensa level IQ to achieve anything except answer some puzzles on the Parade magazine.

Then she waster it...just like that girl said ... so you just agreed with the girl while disagreeing.

There is only one question that seems the wrong thing to ask Savant, and that is what else she is supposed to have done with her life, with her glimmering brain. To ask it is to miss the point. I told her when we met that I had always imagined intelligence to be nothing more than a tool. On that foggy afternoon, before we said goodbye, she wanted to correct me. “I suppose it could be and it should be,” she said. “But it also seems to be an attribute or a quality or an aspect of one’s humanity that one need not use to get something that you want … It can just simply be part of you. And I think that’s fine too.”

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4add9230-23d5-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2VaXkcsvS

Saamiyaar,

Just because someone is 6 feet 8 inches tall and did not want to be an athlete does not mean that he has wasted his physical asset.

by Jeremiah Mburuburu Fri Jun 07, 2013 11:37 pm

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:
Kayalvizhi wrote:
MaxEntropy_Man wrote: paul dirac..

Who is he? How many know of him? Is he the one who introduced dirac function?

yes the very same. the person who introduced the dirac delta function. i don't know how many know of him, but surely anyone who has studied an ounce of quantum mechanics surely knows him. he introduced the use of matrix transformations in quantum mechanics and a simplified notation that makes computing expectation values of physical quantities in QM awfully simple. one of the central figures in twentieth century physics.

on a personal level he is said to have been very strange, but people now think he may have been autistic.

dirac's contributions to quantum physics were far more profound than introducing simplified notation to facilitate certain computations. it was he who first proposed, based on theoretical considerations, the possibility of the existence of anti-matter, in particular, the positron, the anti-matter counterpart of the electron. was it not heisenberg who introduced matrix mechanics into quantum physics?

dirac, i think, was the holder of the isaac newton chair of physics at trinity college, cambridge, before hawking. i remember reading that, at times, dirac was a visiting professor at the university of florida. when you get to that part of the book you're reading, could you tell me why he was at the u of florida rather than at harvard, m.i.t. or caltech? was it an englishman's love of warm weather? wasn't pasadena warm enough for him?

by southindian Sat Jun 08, 2013 12:11 am

Great discussion

Google is great

by Kris Sat Jun 08, 2013 1:06 am

garam_kuta wrote:
doofus_maximus wrote:has an IQ of 162, more than Hawking/Einstein. but only 12 13 years old.

here is someone with an IQ over 195

you could read his story in malcom gladwell's outliers

>>>>Didn't Steve Jobs go to Reed College for a semester as well. LOL @ taking a nap in the midst of the SAT and still making a prefect score. I do remember reading about him in Gladwell's book, but based on what Wiki says, this guy may have been too stifled by a University environment.

by Kris Sat Jun 08, 2013 1:19 am

Rishi wrote:She said that if you do not use your IQ to achieve something then there is no point in having it.

I think it is judgemental.

Marilyn Vos Savant who dropped out of college did not use her Mensa level IQ to achieve anything except answer some puzzles on the Parade magazine.

>>Agree!

by Kris Sat Jun 08, 2013 1:28 am

doofus_maximus wrote:has an IQ of 162, more than Hawking/Einstein. but only 12 13 years old.

>>>Her parents may be very bright as well. People like this don't pop out of nowhere. Seems like a down to earth girl .

by churi. Sat Jun 08, 2013 7:01 am

garam_kuta wrote:
doofus_maximus wrote:has an IQ of 162, more than Hawking/Einstein. but only 12 13 years old.

here is someone with an IQ over 195

you could read his story in malcom gladwell's outliers

Chris Langan's is an exceptional story. I highly recommend that book.

In other news, I just read an article about celebs on the Mensa list: Shakira 140, Madonna 140, Tarantino 160, James Wood 180, Sharon Stone 152.

Shakira is quite the total package.

by MaxEntropy_Man Sat Jun 08, 2013 7:15 am

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:
MaxEntropy_Man wrote:
Kayalvizhi wrote:
MaxEntropy_Man wrote: paul dirac..

Who is he? How many know of him? Is he the one who introduced dirac function?

yes the very same. the person who introduced the dirac delta function. i don't know how many know of him, but surely anyone who has studied an ounce of quantum mechanics surely knows him. he introduced the use of matrix transformations in quantum mechanics and a simplified notation that makes computing expectation values of physical quantities in QM awfully simple. one of the central figures in twentieth century physics.

on a personal level he is said to have been very strange, but people now think he may have been autistic.
dirac's contributions to quantum physics were far more profound than introducing simplified notation to facilitate certain computations. it was he who first proposed, based on theoretical considerations, the possibility of the existence of anti-matter, in particular, the positron, the anti-matter counterpart of the electron. was it not heisenberg who introduced matrix mechanics into quantum physics?

dirac, i think, was the holder of the isaac newton chair of physics at trinity college, cambridge, before hawking. i remember reading that, at times, dirac was a visiting professor at the university of florida. when you get to that part of the book you're reading, could you tell me why he was at the u of florida rather than at harvard, m.i.t. or caltech? was it an englishman's love of warm weather? wasn't pasadena warm enough for him?

i agree with you that dirac's contributions were far more profound than notation, but the first place one encounters him in a formal study of QM is in the bra-ket and operator notation which is central to a lot of calculations. for example in solving the harmonic oscillator (HO) problem which is perhaps the third problem one solves in a QM course the dirac notation and the operator formalism he introduced comes in very handy. the HO problem is crucially important -- atoms in crystalline solids for example can be modeled to a zeroth order approximation as simple HOs. the schrodinger equation for the HO problem is horrendous looking and results in solutions involving hermite polynomials. the operator method due to dirac, which incidentally was his phd thesis, allows calculation of the energy eigenlevels cheaply without actually solving the differential equation. most of the time you are looking for the energy eigenlevels rather than the actual wave functions, because those are the experimentally measurable quantities. my immediate connections to physics are more to do with condensed matter rather than particle physics, so the other contribution of dirac that i am more familiar with is the statistical description of particles like electrons, protons, and neutrons also collectively known as fermions. they obey a statistics known as fermi-dirac statistics.

you may be right that heisenberg and not dirac first introduced matrix mechanics. but i think it was dirac who reconciled the wave mechanics description due to schrodinger, which he is said to have initially disliked, with the matrix mechanics formulation of heisenberg. you are also right about occupying newton's chair. i think it is called the lucasian chair of mathematics or something or the other.

i think by the time he came to florida he was already a very old man and they had him more as a figurative presence who added prestige to the department, rather than as a fully engaged energetic contributor.

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