Interesting question: who was smarter, Einstien or Godel. Admittedly, Einstein is much better known but consider their insights: Einstein had the insight that acceleration and gravity were manifestations of the same phenomenae and could be modeled by curvature of space. Godel had the insight that all sufficiently complex mathematical systems are incomplete. As an (aspiring) mathematician, I find the latter to be much more profound.
It can't possibly matter which one is smarter. We need more of those, that's it.
It helps if the media will portray either as a hero or role model for kids. So in that regard, Einstein was more of a success. Those guys started vocations. There is an exponential effect when your life inspires people generation after generation.
In one year, Einstein wrote four papers that individually could have won Nobel Prizes. Perhaps Gödel's revelation was more profound. But was Gödel smarter? I doubt it, at least using impressiveness of accomplishments as a proxy for intelligence.
This is quite confusing: you're talking about using "impressiveness" as a "proxy" to measure intelligence, then you're talking about measuring such impressiveness.
I don't even know what it is to measure impressiveness poorly -- I don't know how to measure it. Nobel-worthy publications are surely impressive, but it still does not measure intelligence. It measures how Nobel-worthy your work is.
The more you study intelligence, the more you realize that "smart" is such a vague concept that it is borderline useless.
Example: whose work was more difficult to understand? Godel's work came "naturally" to Godel; Einstein's came "naturally" to Einstein. They are both "unnatural" for most people. That says nothing about smartness, aside of that both are capable of something that most are not.
Next question: was Godel better at math than Einstein was at physics? My answer is "... huh?"
>As an (aspiring) mathematician, I find the latter to be much more profound.
I'm not surprised. People usually find their own subject more <fill in the blank>.
I think you also don't realize how profound Einsteins relativity is. It's a lot more than acceleration and gravity (even if that's how it starts), the implications change an immense amount of stuff.
That's why people find their own subject more compelling - they understand it more completely.
I would argue that it does. More abstract concepts often (and especially in this case) elucidate a concept with wider application. General relativity gives us insight into a possible model of our universe. Godel's incompleteness theorem gives us insight into all complex axiomatic systems in all possible universes. The difference is definitely there and an argument can be made (up to senses of aesthetics) that one is better than the other.
