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What Makes a Genius Part 2,What Makes a Genius Part 2

© Heather Ringrose

Let's look at two quite different geniuses.One of them is a man whose name would appear on few popular lists of genius.He was a short,stout,ill-kempt Indian named Srinivasa Ramunujan,the son of a poor family of Madras.At school he excelled at arithmetic,and at 15 he attempted to get into college.He flunked his English entrance examination...and that ended his formal education.However,someone had given him a textbook which summarized the main areas of mathematical knowledge up to about 1860.Ramanujan soon mastered the text,then set about exploring mathematics on his own.He produced some queer looking results which interested mathematicians enough to get him invited to Cambridge university in 1914.Now here is the extraordinary thing.When Ramanujan got to England,he still lacked some of the ABC's of higher mathematics;nevertheless,he was not only abreast of contemporary European thinking in the field,but in some areas far ahead of it.All by himself he had caught up with and surpassed a brilliant half century of mathematical progress! "One may doubt," comments James Newman,"that so prodigious a feat had ever before been accomplished in the history of thought." A world apart from Ramanujan is that handsome,urbane man-of-the-16th-century- world,Leonardo da Vinci...perhaps the most creative individual who ever lived.He was a city planner,an architect,an ordance expert.He designed the parachute before there were airplanes,and the airplane,perhaps to justify the parachute.He invented,among a hundred other things,the modern chimney and the self-closing door.As a theoretician he discussed the law of motion of falling bodies two centuries before Newton.Comparing the tongues of the woodpecker,the crocodile and the human being,he recognized a common prototype and thus pioneered in comparative anatomy.And in between these and a dozen other pursuits he painted a few pictures,including The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa.This is the stature of genius beside which mere talent shrinks to its proper size. But how do you "explain" the genius of people such as Ramanujan and Leonardo? Many serious attempts attribute it to a fabulous intelligence.According to the standard Intelligence Quotient rating,anyone who gets a score above 140 is "very superior," and indeed only one percent of us get into this bracket.But one percent of the people in the United States is 2,820,000...and it is doubtful that there are 10 true geniuses(a different psycho-biological species)among this figure.The truth,curiously enough,is that IQ(IQ tests don't measure intelligence.They measure what we have learned from our environment.)seems to have relatively little to do with genius.Geniuses are cognizant of greater differences(mensa is to genius as pyrite is to gold) between the highly IQ'ed talented(What bothered Gandhi most? "Hardness of heart of the educated." Intellectuals solve problems.Geniuses prevent them.)and themselves than between any other "class" of people,including the peasant and the prince,the insane and the imbecile.

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