[ExI] Asimov's 90th today

[Samantha Atkins]

On Jan 3, 2011, at 10:39 AM, John Clark wrote:

> On Jan 2, 2011, at 8:58 PM, David Lubkin wrote:
> 
>> Fred Pohl's best friend was Isaac
> 
> True.
> 
>> one of the two people he would admit was smarter than he. (The other was Minsky.) 
> 
> Actually no, in his autobiography he said that both he and Pohl had IQ tests, I don't remember the exact numbers but both were in the upper 150's, however Asimov beat Pohl by one point. The only two people that Asimov had ever met that he thought were smarter than him were Martin Minsky and Carl Sagan.

I have met one or two people that were so brilliant and or seemingly differently wired that  I have trouble to this day believing they were within human range.    I watched one write two quite non-trivial programs, one with each hand, while discussing a fairly substantial technical issue orthogonal to either one.  


- samantha

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