Fun article by John Psmith featuring some ferociously competitive mathematicians and physicists. A quote:
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In the 1696 edition of Acta Eruditorum, Johann Bernoulli threw down the gauntlet:
"I, Johann Bernoulli, address the most brilliant mathematicians in the world. Nothing is more attractive to intelligent people than an honest, challenging problem, whose possible solution will bestow fame and remain as a lasting monument. Following the example set by Pascal, Fermat, etc., I hope to gain the gratitude of the whole scientific community by placing before the finest mathematicians of our time a problem which will test their methods and the strength of their intellect. If someone communicates to me the solution of the proposed problem, I shall publicly declare him worthy of praise.
Given two points A and B in a vertical plane,
what is the curve traced out by a point acted on only by gravity,
which starts at A and reaches B in the shortest time."
This became known as the brachistochrone problem, and it occupied the best minds of Europe for, well, for less time than Johann Bernoulli hoped. The legend goes that he issued that pompous challenge I quoted above, and shortly afterward discovered that his own solution to the problem was incorrect. Worse, in short order he received five copies of the actually correct solution to the problem, supposedly all on the same day. The responses came from Newton, Leibniz, l’Hôpital, Tschirnhaus, and worst of all, his own brother Jakob Bernoulli, who had upstaged him yet again.
(1/2) (The fun part about Newton comes in part 2.)
What’s fun about this story is that if it’s true, then it provides us with a nice rank-ordering of the IQs of early 18th century scientists. He may have gotten all the responses on the same day, but back then letters took very different amounts of time to travel to different cities. So his brother Jakob, right next door in Italy, had weeks to work on the problem while Johan’s challenge slowly made its way to London and Newton’s response slowly made its way back. As it happens, one of Newton’s servants left a journal entry stating that one night the master arrived home from the Royal Mint, found a letter from abroad, flew into a rage, stayed up all night writing a response, and sent it out in the next morning’s post. If Newton really did solve in one night a problem that took Bernoulli weeks and Leibniz and l’Hôpital at least a few days, then this gives a sense of the fearsomeness of his powers. Newton’s own comment on the topic was simply: “I do not love to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things."
@johncarlosbaez
Some of the many Bernoullis were brialliant, but there's a difference between brilliant versus other-worldly genius like Newton, Ramanujan, Fermat, etc.
You (John) undoubtedly have an accurate perception of genius in people.
@dougmerritt - I definitely think about it! I don't tend to think of Fermat as an otherworldly genius, I think of him as a very smart lawyer who corresponded with lots of mathematicians and physicists. But looking at his biography, I realize I may be underestimating him. Newton was an otherworldly genius of an articulate and versatile sort: the sort who changes the course of civilization. Ramanujan seems like an inarticulate, specialized genius with a completely incomprehensible intuitive ability to spot fascinating formulas - perhaps a mere curiosity in the grand scheme of things, but extremely puzzling.
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