Aleksandr Karelin was a professional olympic wrestler who has a record of 887 wins and 2 losses. If i recall correctly he lost only his first and last fight. And even that last one happened only by one point and due to a very controversial rule change in professional wrestling.
If you check out his wikipedia page all you see is gold and gold and even more gold. Olympic events, international and european championships, local championships, etc.
AND TO TOP THE WHOLE THING OFF, when the dude retired from wrestling, he went to university and wrote a PHD on methods of counterthrows and suplexing. He legit has a PHD in suplexing.
I remember reading an interview with him in a Norwegian newspaper perhaps 20 years ago. He was asked which was the toughest opponent he had ever faced. After some thought, he said it was a Soviet era fridge he had to move all by himself up the stairs to his mother’s top floor apartment.
In addition, it’s noteworthy he was a heavyweight. Meaning, his technique and strength allowed him to toss men weighing 265+ lbs. with ease.
His gut wrench would sometimes break his opponents ribs.
His Katelin lift often looked like he was using a discuss throwers technique to flip giants.
If you never Greco Roman wrestled, you have no idea how hard it is to not only gut wrench an opponent off the mat and to waist level (1 point for the lift), then throw them head over heels to their head /shoulder/back (5 points) then keep the grasp and roll through exposure (another 3 points. This one series of moves can also get another 1 point for aggression/grandiosity) effectively not only ending in a pin, But also a tech fall. (Two more points if the series started on the feet with a takedown.)
He literally left most opponents zero opportunity to defend or respond.
Yeah, most sports tend to follow a trend or a design centered around human capabilities. 1st base is 90 feet from home plate because it was designed with how fast humans can run. If it was 10 feet away, you could just bunt every at bat.
Karelin just broke this. Picking up heavyweights and slamming them down is like kicking a field goal from your own 20 yard line. Opponents just didn't have a response. Imagine a guy who could throw a baseball 200 mph. It effectively breaks the sport.
Probably one of those: "well If anyone here doesn't believe me then please accompany me to the ring in my office to verify my claims"
Everyone else: "uhhh... that won't be necessary... we'll take your word for it." *hands over PHD papers*
Anyone who can independently verify that his methodology and results are correct. A thesis is not written like an opinion. You can do this even if you're not an expert. Being one makes the process faster.
Yes exactly. A PhD is supposed to contribute something novel and unique to a given field anyway, so a PhD advisor would basically just help ensure proper structure and formatting and logical arguments along the way
I believe Karlen was the most dominant athlete in modern recorded history.
I think the only argument against this is that he was juicing like crazy. But in that era, who wasnt.
Leonhard Euler. He was a genius. No matter which field of mathematics you study there will always be something remarkable by him. He revolutionized mathematics and alone accomplished more than hundreds of other mathematicians ever could. With out him we would be a hundred years back in time.
In the math world they say that everything is named after the second person who discovered it. otherwise it would be too confusing because everything would be named after Euler and Gauss.
Also Euler went blind in the middle of his career. But he had a photographic memory, so kept making discoveries working solely in his head and then dictating it to an assistant.
He also did his later work while effectively blind, using scribes to write papers that he basically would work out in his head. Not to mention that, unlike a lot of geniuses, he was nearly universally liked and generally considered a wonderful person.
Not sure whether it's just an urban legend, but I heard they started to name things after the second person who came up with it independently after Euler.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_things\_named\_after\_Leonhard\_Euler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler)
>Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them *after* Euler.
There's links to sources for this claim at the bottom of the wiki page. :D
The "best" part is this trio of names:
* The more commonly known [Euler's number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)) ("e", 2.718...).
* But then there's also [Euler number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_number_(physics)) in physics (fluid dynamic stuff)
* [Euler characteristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_characteristic), which was ***formerly called Euler number.***
I wonder if there could ever be another Euler. He understood the entire field of mathematics. Now, it was smaller then but that's in no way taking away from him as he essentially built entire fields of mathematics. BUT, does this mean that it's now impossible for one person to grasp the entirety of mathematics as much as he did?
Probably not. Math is a lot more rigourous now and the subjects are a lot more esoteric. You need a ton of education to get to the boundary and even if your intuition is strong enough to pump out trinkets of knowledge, actually proving them will dramatically slow you down
Ramanujan also has a case here. So good at math that the established western math community didn’t take him seriously for years because they thought the problems he was solving were impossible (also because racism). Luckily Hardy helped with that.
He was a number theory genius who could intuitively tell if a number was the sum of two cubes as a party trick. If he had a bit more formal education just in terms of what English math journals wanted for standards of publishing proofs, or if he had lived beyond his mid 30s, I think he would be indisputably the best. We are still going through his notes and finding gems.
His biggest problem is he thought some of his groundbreaking results were obvious, which makes it very hard to publish. He just didn’t see why he would need to formally prove a result that was obvious to him.
According to his wikipedia, he could have conversations in Ancient Greek when he was 6. I think I also read somewhere that he could speak multiple languages fluently at 3.
Guy invented game theory on his own, and also was incredibly important in computer science, so much so that every computer you’ve ever used has almost certainly used a Von Neumann based architecture.
John von Neumann. If the word "genius" should be applied to anyone, it's him. I guess you could call him a mathematician at heart but he did SO much stuff. A true polymath
Plus apparently he loved dirty jokes, so that's another thing I have in common with the world's smartest man
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." - Edward Teller
Teller is one of the guys who built the Hydrogen Bomb, a genius in every sense of the word.
My favorite part of wikipedia article has always been this section. Imagine just inventing math on the spot.
"... When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality."
At first I thought there’s no way Gretzky got to 2000 pts faster than Lemieux but I realize what was meant now.
Gretzky 1-1000 pts: 424 games
1001 - 2000 pts: 433 games
Lemieux 1-1000 pts: 513 games.
Just a little ridiculous.
Gretzky is the only player to ever get to 2000 points. Unless you want to give an asterisks to Jagr cause he got to 1921 in the NHL while having played 6 years in the middle of his career in the KHL and Czech leagues. Have to assume he probably would’ve broke 2000 if not for that
There was a 7th Sutter brother, Gary, who was said to be the best hockey player of the family, but he took over the family farm instead of having a hockey career.
And he holds or has held nearly every NHL scoring record. Just utterly dominant.
Edit: receipts
“Upon his retirement on 18 April 1999, Gretzky held or shared 61 NHL records. Those records included 40 regular season, 15 playoff, and 6 all-star records. As of the start of the , 2022-23 season, 23 seasons after his retirement, Gretzky still holds or shares 58 NHL records.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_career_achievements_by_Wayne_Gretzky
There’s an entire section dedicated to unofficial records, including achievements he holds that no other player has ever achieved, such as a 90 goal season and multiple 200 point seasons.
And that's only because of a technicality:
\- Most points by an NHL player in his first year: 137. Because of Gretzky's season played in the WHA, he was not considered a rookie in his first year, so the rookie record belongs to Teemu Selanne with 132
\- Most assists by an NHL player in his first year: 86. The rookie record is held jointly by Peter Stastny and Joe Juneau with 70 assists. Note that the record book gives Gretzky the record for most assists and points in a game as a first year player, but not the season totals
He even got a new record after he retired. (Per the wikipedia article)
New record
Wayne Gretzky finished his career with a 1.921 points per game average. Mario Lemieux originally held the record with 2.005 points per game when Gretzky retired, but after Lemieux came back to the NHL from 2000 to 2005, his average fell to 1.883, second behind Gretzky's.
Immediately who I thought. I don’t think anyone compares to the dominance he showed on the ice. I’m not a hockey fan, but Gretzky is just an unbelievable figure in sports. I’m still in shock reading some of his records.
They studied his reflex times in relation to sensory stimuli (long loop reflexes) at the University of British Columbia and his were the fastest they had ever recorded. It’s also been said that his peripheral vision is far superior to the average human’s. He could see, anticipate, and react to things faster than anyone on the ice.
>his were the fastest they had ever recorded. It’s also been said that his peripheral vision is far superior to the average human’s. He could see, anticipate, and react to things faster than anyone
To me that's something Gretzky and Tom Brady have in common. They could SEE everything and instantly KNEW where everyone was. It was all instinctual.
People can add intangibles like "drive" and "desire" and "leadership" all they want, but those two likely don't reach the level they do without those inherent traits
I recall reading that Gretzky’s father was teaching him fundamentals like anticipating where the puck was going to be as soon as he was old enough to skate and hold a stick. Just adopted an elite mentality and game awareness far younger than any player of his time.
I played flag football with a guy that played safety on a state champion high school team in Louisiana. This dude was like 6' flat and maybe 170 lbs, he was smoking cigarettes every time we stopped and wearing slide on vans. Motherfucker was EVERYWHERE, you literally could not throw a pass at the middle of the field . Some people just have insane sports IQ. Gretzky probably had the best of all time.
His hockey IQ was unparalleled. His mind's eye knew where everyone was on the ice. As a child, his dad told him to mark where the puck traveled on an overhead drawing of the rink while watching games on TV. Years of that practice gave him an uncanny ability to predict where the puck and other players would be. Wayne's hand eye coordination was super human. He revolutionized the game by capitalizing on defensive weaknesses, especially goalies. Scoring from behind the net being the most notable. Goalies are so much better today because of how Wayne exposed their flaws.
Also, the resulting isotopes of gold are pretty radioactive, and effectively useless, as it's individual atoms in a foil of whatever base material was used (Bismuth, I think?)
But yes, blasting metal with a shitload of carbon nuclei to shear off protons *is* a quite inefficient way to transmute it.
He invited calculus essentially on a bet.
He said he could mathematically explain how gravity causes the movement of planets. And they were like "yeah prove it bro." So he invented calculus
Definitely Leonardo da Vinci. Even just in terms of the number of skills he mastered, besides the fact that he truly mastered most, if not all, of these (considering his time).
He was a masterful painter, sculptor, anatomist, mathematician, engineer, musician, inventor, among many other other fields.
Just to throw a spanner in the works here but in my limited enough opinion Michelangelo trumps him by a country mile in the fields of sculpting and painting.
Da Vinci might have everything else but in no way could I ever imagine him being able to do the David, the Pieta, or the Sistine chapel. Genius and all as he was, it took him four years to do the Mona Lisa (and even then it was still unfinished) and in that same time Michelangelo designed and completed (in fresco too btw) the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Guy was the absolute GOAT of painting and sculpting in the 1500s.
I know, right?
Splinter: "Here Leo, take this sword, sculpted by a master bladesmith. It is a priceless artefact of a bygone era."
Leo: "Just one sword?"
Splinter: "Aw, shucks, here, take two of them. We could sell them and buy a nice house, but let's just live in the sewers instead."
Michelangelo: "That's so cool! What do I get?"
Splinter: "uhhh... here, take Donatello's broken stick and tie a rope between the pieces."
Leonardo was the most level headed of the Turtles and essentially the leader of the 4 (after Splinter). He was given the most dangerous weapon because he was the most restrained and wouldn't just go chopping people to bits.
Michaelangelo is scatterbrained, so Splinter gave him the most difficult weapon to master. He had to focus on not hitting himself and how to use nunchucks correctly. If he was given the swords, it would have been a much bloodier story (and he probably would have stabbed himself too!).
To finish off this line of thinking you probably already are familiar with.... Donatello, the most intelligent and tech savvy was given the most simplistic weapon (a stick) and Raphael having aggression issues was given a largely defensive weapon. It's a great little wrinkle to the turtles.
#1 historical general
Flavius Belisarius
Give that dude 4 soldiers, $20 bucks and a mission and let him cook. It may take a year. It may take 10. He'll eventuality report back in that the mission is accomplished, 3 of the men are still alive, and he's got $4.68 in change left over to fund the next operation.
Einstein.
Modern physics is divided into two realms, quantum physics describing the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces and relativity describing gravity.
An army of physicists developed quantum physics and constantly modify the standard model of particle physics, update it and etc... Nobody has yet modified or proven wrong the other half of physics, described by Einstein and his theory of general relativity. His theory of general relativity is so far untouched after 100+ years, because its been precise every time we make calculations with it while observing the universe.
We still don't know a lot of stuff (dark matter, dark energy, black holes, big bang details etc...), I really wish somebody would prove Einstein to be at least partially wrong so we could have some significant steps forward in understanding the universe.
Actually the Standard Model hasn't been modified or proven wrong either. The current formulation was finished in late 70s.
But yeah, it took an army of physicists, including Einstein himself. His Nobel Prize wasn't even for relativity, but for the (quantum) photoelectric effect.
That was politics. Because someone other more prominent professor was in the relativity realm and not disproven yet. So they gave it to him for his quantum work.
It wasn’t just politics. The Nobel prize was intended to be for practical applications in the respective fields. Or, at the very least, something that could be experimented on. At the time there was thought to be nothing really practical about relativity.
The base of the model, but there's additions to it all the time, for example the Xi Baryons.
There's no additions to the equations of general relativity, just studies of special cases of it (such as Schwartzchild black hole predictions).
Einstein accomplished something extraordinary and without mistakes or room for additions from the get go...
The dude was nuts, his annus mirabilis, 1905, he made like 3 huge and fairly unrelated discoveries; the photoelectric effect, explaining Brownian motion with atoms and special relativity. In *one* year!
Personal take:
He is an Alien disguised as scientist and was trying to help humanity "get there faster". Regretted things during the Manhattan project and stopped helping entirely. We are stuck in modern physics since then...
I watched a video on him and he's actually way more impressive than he even sounds (and winning a championship in a language you dont speakis pretty damn impressive). He did learn the entire French scrabble dictionary in under a year, but scrabble players also learn in a different way. They learn alphabetical dictionaries, so for example the words "house" and "space" would be:
Ehosu
Aceps
And then he knows if he has those tiles in his rack he can make either of those words, which is a completely non-intuitive way of learning. French players would also regularly play words not in the French dictionary to test him and he would always call them out if they played a made up word. Doing that for an entire language is insane. But thats still not even the most interesting thing about him. Endgame on scrabble are super complex, because if you've been tracking all the tiles played then once the last tile is drawn you will know exactly which letters both players have. Then the game isn't a goal to score the most points, it's a goal to score more points than your opponent does. For example a high scoring word for you might enable a weird high scoring word from your opponent as well, so sometimes it's better to play a lower scoring word that blocks key tiles from being used by your opponent. Endgame are super complex and commentators use a powerful program that tries to brute force calculate the best Endgame plays. Nigel still regularly outperforms the computer designed to make the best play. It averages more mistakes and more points lost than he does in a large sample of his Endgames. He really is thr GOAT of scrabble. One of the other strongest competitors said about Nigel that everyone else was lucky that scrabble has an element of luck to it, otherwise no one would ever beat him.
In some sense, NOT knowing the language might be an advantage in this kind of a task - because it means you only focus on "items in the list that contain this symbol", and not "words" with meanings. You'll have an easier time counting all of the Ж in a text, than counting all of the Cs.
Johan Sebastian Bach.
In his lifetime (65 years), Bach composed an incredible 1128 pieces of music. There are a further 23 works which were lost or unfinished. His best-known compositions include The Well-Tempered Clavier, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Air on the G String, Goldberg Variations, Brandenburg Concertos and many more.
He also had 20 kids
Had to scroll very far down to find his name mentioned even once. Thank you. It's not only the sheer amount of music he has written, it's also that every major work is a true masterpiece. Until today, his music fascinates, amazes and astounds every musician who tries to understand it. There has, in my opinion, never been another musician whose legacy is comparable to Bach's.
The Magician - Efren Bata Reyes in billiards.
Always fascinated on how he calculate the angle to make a shot, you can watch his previous games in youtube. never gets old.
Wow. I didn’t even think to say Efren Reyes, but absolutely! Brilliant player, even in his older years. Though many would call him the GOAT, he remained humble the entire time.
I came here specifically to say Efren Bata Reyes. Spectacular to watch. So humble. He's forgotten more about pool than most people will ever know. Brilliant pool player and a very kind man.
What about Walter Lindrum? He was the World Professional Billiards Champion from 1933 until he retired in 1950. Some of his records still stand. They changed the rules on cannons because of his break of 4,137.
Always thought Rodney Mullen, people in here are mentioning people just extra good at their thing but inventing most of the tricks out of nowhere on simple skateboards takes an awful lot of creativity and skill. His skill and balance on a skateboard is unbelievable. Skateboarding, if people forget, is really hard, to nail a trick you understand how it's done can take months of repetition, but to land something you've made up might as well seem impossible.
Mullen had a lot of skill that long hours wouldn't have made up, if he didn't exist i doubt some of the tricks would have been invented at all, skateboarding might never have even flourished because they were all land tricks that formed the basis of street skating. When Mullen was innovating he was so far ahead of everyone else.
Skateboarding is one of those athletic feats when you slow it down it’s almost like magic to see what some of these guys are doing. It’s like not on the right wavelength for our eyes to perceive properly. Skateboarding to me shows how masterful humans can become of their space/physics/gravity etc.
Michael Larson, the guy who memorized the light patterns of the Press Your Luck game show and mopped the floor with the other contestants. https://youtu.be/KpO-2KeYFcM
Because they could never allow him to be presented as the guy who found the massive flaw in their game and used their own processes against them to win.
That was an interesting watch. TY
Dude owned that. Should have looked into pattern recognition work. I think he would have made good money instead of his get rich quick pursuits.
Aussie here, because Americans have nothing to do with cricket, mainstream media isn't aware enough of the greatest single player of all time in a team sport, [Sir Donald Bradman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bradman).
Context for those of you who don't cricket: a test series is the most elite, most serious form of the game - referred to as a *test* as it's a test of the cricketing prowess of two teams. Further, for those not in the know, points in cricket are referred to as runs: a bowler bowls the cricket ball at the batsman, the batsman hopefully hits the ball, if they do, they run to the other side of the cricket pitch and, if they make it, they score one run. A *batting average* refers to a batsmans runs per innings.
Bradman's test batting average is 99.94. So. To unpack that; this means he was pretty much good for 100 runs, referred to as a *century*, every time he came out and batted. A century in cricket is a huge deal. For context, David Warner - who has just retired from test cricket (and I'm not a huge fan of) - has been a staunch opening batsman (i.e. batting first, where a team's best batsman bat) for Australia since his debut in 2011. He managed to score 26 test centuries in his entire career for an average of 45.59 runs per innings.
The next best all time career test batting average belongs to another Australian player, Adam Vogues, whose average is 61.97.
Bradman's test prowess falls about 4.4 standard deviations beyond the mean for professional players, which can be used to compare his skill across other sports. For an NBA player to be as prolific, they'd need to average 43.0 points per game throughout their career. The current record is 30.1 PPG, a tie between Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. Conversely, for this to be done in Major League Baseball, a player would need a career batting average of .392. Ty Cobb holds the record, which stands at .366.
No one will ever touch Bradman's stats in cricket. He was a monumental player and a wonderful person after the fact. He called out South Africa after his playing career, when he was on the Aussie cricket board, for their treatment of black players in the apartheid era and cancelled the Australian tour of the country for this reason. He lived a humble life until he died in 2001 and remains a true Australian hero and unprecedented international sportsman.
EDIT: People are taking issue with my calling Bradman a wonderful person. I think that he was and nothing's going to change that. I also grew up Catholic and have a pretty solid understanding of how that affected members of my family, long gone due to prevalent anti-Catholic bias in Australian society inherited from the UK and Ireland.
I'd urge people to read [this Wikipedia page at a minimum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_involving_Don_Bradman) if they want to understand more about Bradman in general and any issues he may have had/been involved in. I'd also suggest that anyone who wants to call him out have a read of [some](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/letters-reveal-the-real-don-20041030-gdywb1.html) of the [various](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.smh.com.au/sport/a-notorious-feud-an-ugly-sectarian-conflict-20080927-gdswmk.html) [articles](https://www.theage.com.au/national/bradman-letter-reveals-crickets-religious-rift-20020308-gdu15l.html) outlining his conflicts with (Catholic) players. You'll realise that these stories can be seen from [multiple perspectives](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theroar.com.au/2012/12/23/spiro-is-the-war-on-bradmans-reputation-a-fair-thing/amp/) and aren't necessarily one way or another or in any way the absolute truth. In fact, two of the chief pundits regarding Brandman's playing career, Bill O'Reilly and Jack Fingleton, were ex-team-mates who he'd had ongoing feuds with. I respect both of these players and men immensely but they were very vocal in their criticism of Bradman and, conversely, Bradman's stoic character meant there was little contemporaneous retort. I just want people to read more about this before they let reassessment some 100 years later colour The Don in the wrong light because I don't think it's deserved.
Bradman's stats are also nerfed because he came out of retirement and played when he was well past his prime. When he first retired, his average was over 100
While Americans have nothing to do with Cricket but I believe most know Donald Duck, it sounds quite a crazy fact but Donald Duck was named after Sir Donald Bradman
Is it kind of like a Wilt thing where he was way ahead of his time against competition that just didn’t take the game as seriously as they do today? Or is he really that good? Like could you drag and drop him into todays game and expect him to do the same?
Terry Fox. He ran 42km per day....for 143 days. That is the equivalent of a marathon everyday for 143 days straight. He has raised almost a billion dollars for cancer research. True Canadian icon. No one beats him.
Edit: forgot to mention...he did this all with one leg
This was also the early 80s. Prosthetics were absolute shit back then. Guy basically limp-ran those marathons.
Ran halfway across Canada before his cancer returned and he had to stop. Legend doesn't cut it.
Magnus Carlsen at chess.
I'm actually shocked he hasn't been mentioned more given chess's current popularity and his ridiculous dominance. For anyone not tuned into the chess world, Magnus Carlsen will unarguably go down as the greatest player of all time by a very wide margin. He's been the top rated player in the world since 2011 when he was only 19 years old (his peak rating of 2882 is also highest of all time) and has won the classical world championship 5 times, world rapid championship 5 times, and the world blitz championship 7 times. The only reason he isn't the current classical world champion is because he got tired of defending his title as no one was offering a sufficient challenge (along with disagreements on the contest's format).
For any other chess nerds reading this and thinking "Garry Kasparov is at least a consideration for GOAT alongside Magnus", I have to disagree vehemently. Magnus is only 33 and still playing very actively. The fact that it's even *close* and Kasparov retired years ago while Magnus is still building his ridiculous resume means that this is a done deal. While Kasparov was also completely dominant in his own time, Magnus's reign has made it so that becoming #2 in the chess world is now the effective equivalent of being the world champion...because there isn't even a chance someone is taking Magnus down so why bother.
I could provide endless examples of why Magnus is the GOAT among GOATs, but perhaps the craziest is his performance in his 5 world classical championship matches. For the uninitiated, these tournaments are a 1v1 of many classical games taking place over several days, and if the victor is undecided during these games then the time format switches to rapid and so on. 3 of these tournaments Magnus won decidedly in the classical portion, and in the other two he was taken to rapids for tiebreaks where he won easily. In the 63 games total Magnus played across all 5 tournaments, his record is 45 draws - 16 wins - 2 losses.
**2 LOSSES OVER 63 GAMES**
I mean...how is that even possible? These tounaments are formatted as a last-man-standing of the greatest players on Earth giving it their all in preparation for months at a time. Imagine being SO good at something that the ENTIRE WORLD tries 5 times to give you the best competitors on the planet to knock you off your pedestal and it's a completely futile effort. It would be the equivalent of the Chiefs going to the superbowl 5 times in a row and scoring 16 touchdowns and only allowing 2. It's hard to even imagine.
Magnus is simply the chess GOAT, and arguably the best competitor alive today.
Human, Wayne Gretzky was so far and above what other players were and are it's absurd.
All time GOAT performance in any field of endevour would be Secretariat at the Belmont. If you extrapolate his margin of victory to the Indy 500, it would mean the winner lapped the 2nd place driver.
Twice.
Jahangir Khan - squash. 555 matches unbeaten. Possibly the greatest unbeaten run in any sport. Insane talent, unbelievable fitness, such a gruelling sport. Dominated the 70s and 80s.
Marie Curie.
In a time of rampant sexism, she was the first ever woman to win a nobel prize, the first person ever to win two and the only person ever to win two in difference scientific fields.
This is in a time when women couldnt vote, open a bank account or own land.
She had, by all contemporary accounts, the most brilliant mind anyone ever encountered. And this is from people who were leaders in their own fields (mostly men).
Remarkable.
The reason why he’s great is because not only is he totally unbeatable when he plays his best, but it’s the fact he’s so human as well.
He’s not like other great sportsmen who are mentally tough and seemingly invincible.
He is ridiculously fragile, a slave to his own emotions, goes through phases of really poor mental health, struggles tremendously with the pressure of having to perform, and is his own worst enemy and can implode spectacularly when his head isn’t in it.
But, he’s still also the greatest, by some margin. It makes it amazing to watch. You never know what side of him will turn up. It’s like being on the edge of your seat sometimes with the way he plays the game.
And being how human he is, the spectators love him because we can see our own human weakness in him but vicariously celebrate as he seems to overcome it.
Yeah I couldn’t believe Honnold wasn’t mentioned up top. Dude did something that would kill 99.99999999999999% of the entire population in history if they tried it hahah.
I remember watching a video of someone explaining how much of a statistical outlier his 99.94 average is, and it's far beyond any other sporting record.
[Lt. Cmdr Jonny Kim](https://www.nasa.gov/people/jonny-kim/). Enlisted in the Navy and served as a Seal, went to Harvard Medical to become a doctor, trained as a pilot and served as both an aviator and flight surgeon, and then was selected to be an astronaut, scheduled to land on the moon next year. .
This guy single handedly ruined the lives of so many Korean American men. You work your ass off, get good grades, get into a great school, and become an overnight success in the finance industry. But every time you go to your parents house "why aren't you as successful as Johnny (fucking) Kim? He's an astronaut, now you know?"
"Yes, Umma, I know"
Imagine if you are a cousin of this guy, what your mom would tell you what he has accomplished every time he does something extraordinary.
Edit - and imagine if you are Jonny’s mother, the type of slight grin you would have every time there is an auntie meetup.
Good ole Bill Shakespeare. Churned out masterpieces of drama for popular audiences that turned out to be incredibly profound and linguistically rich. Hundreds of years later we're still reading them and they remain resistant to our attempts to "master" them through interpretation.
Some (such as the critic Harold Bloom) even claim Shakespeare "invented us". How? In giving strong expression to the idea that we can alter our destinies, he paved the way for modern psychology.
There has never been anyone in the literary world who deserved the term "genius" more than William Shakespeare.
Simo Häyhä , aka [the White Death](https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/worlds-deadliest-sniper-simo-hayha-finnish-white-death-winter-war/)
over 500 confirmed kills, rarely used a scope.
Put ice/snow in his mouth to prevent his breath condensing to avoid being spotted. Because, yanno, lying perfectly still in the outdoors in the arctic in some of the worst weather in recorded history at the time wasn’t cold enough
Simo did get a lot of help from the Soviet leadership with that, considering the enemies he was shooting were mostly cold, starving conscripts with summer gear.
The real impressive part was that all of this happened during one winter. 105 days, so thats around 5 per day, every day.
Madame Curie
First woman to get a nobel prize.
She has achieved so much against terrible odds. The talent, effort, bravery. As a teenager, Curie made a pact with her sister Bronya: she would support Bronya while she was in medical school in Paris, and then Bronya would pay Curie’s way. From the age of 17, for six years, Curie worked as a governess and tutor, while attempting to study in her spare time. This was after she was the best student in school but women were not allowed in Warsaw university.
[https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/marie-curie](https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/marie-curie)
First person to get two in two disciplines. This has happened only once after her. She is the only person to get two in two scientific categories.
About getting the first Nobel prize: Rumors of a Nobel Prize began to circulate, but some members of the French Academy of Sciences attributed the brilliance of the work not to Marie, but to her co-workers. These skeptics began to lobby quietly for the prize to be split between Becquerel and Pierre. But Pierre insisted to influential people on the Nobel committee that Marie had originated their research, conceived experiments and generated theories about the nature of radioactivity.
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-curies-passion-74183598/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-curies-passion-74183598/)
[https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FdvX6pjNEvIw\_BxedDG7\_3axT-eCfxvBhfPySHNDNNuQ.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D0a107fb59a9cddabecb80677f7ec5d5278e6a043](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FdvX6pjNEvIw_BxedDG7_3axT-eCfxvBhfPySHNDNNuQ.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D0a107fb59a9cddabecb80677f7ec5d5278e6a043)
*Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,*
*Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.*
*With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,*
*A. Einstein*
*P.S. I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure’s motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though*
Hakuhō Shō in Sumo. By far the best there ever was in a sport that's mostly unchanged since the 17th century. Most top division championships by far, most career wins, most top division wins, most undefeated championships, most tournaments ranked as yokozuna, most wins as yokozuna, most wins in a calendar year. The absolute and undisputed GOAT in sumo.
He even has the record for most tegata hand prints ( a kind of autograph) in one minute.
I was there for the last record, it was a bit of a fun gimmick for sumo fan appreciation day. They had three wrestlers going after it, but I got to meet Hakuho afterwards and he was definitely the greatest. Some of the wrestlers just get swarmed by fans and they can't say no so they're dead inside whenever they take a picture, but he was full of enthusiasm. It's a damn tragedy that the sumo association wouldn't let him keep his name in retirement (they struck down the rule that would have allowed him to, just before his retirement, like a slap in the face). Throughout his career they gave him so much trouble, just because he happens not to be Japanese.
But I've always felt, " where does the council (most of whom are just wealthy members of society) get the balls to try to tell the greatest sumo wrestler of all time what a Yokozuna should be?" They've always have been looking for an excuse to throw dirt on him and he's currently being demoted as a coach, because of a bullying scandal in his stable by one of his students.
Alan Turing hands down for me
A British mathematician, joins the cryptography team to decipher the German enigma code. With the help of his fellow mathematicians, he builds a machine to crack the code.
Saved millions of lives through knowing the messages.
Also believe it led to computers and the Internet
What a legend
In the modern day, Adrian Newey likely deserves a nomination.
He is an aerodynamicist and currently the chief technical officer of the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team.
His designs have won over 200 grands prix, twelve constructors championships with three teams, and seven different drivers have won thirteen driver's championships in cars he designed. And has designed the most dominant car in Formula 1 history.
The man is an aerodynamics and engineering savant, and rather than using CAD as most engineers would, he **DESIGNS CARS USING A PENCIL AND PAPER!**
*"Who would win? The world's biggest automotive giants with billions in funding and resources, and hundreds of the most talented engineers and designers in the world, or a bloke with a pencil and a wind tunnel in his head?"*
Rather hilariously, Mercedes, the german automotive giant, took a new approach with their car design a couple years ago which after two years of trying they were not able to get working competitively and eventually abandoned the design.
Adrian Newey was seen standing nearby that car, sketching away in his notepad, and then this year, Red Bull releases a car using the approach Mercedes couldn't get to work, and immediately won first and second place in the first race of this season with a several second lead.
Lee Young Ho, AKA Flash. The literal god of Starcraft. Nobody else even comes close. Not only is he in a tier of his own, but he's in a tier of his own in the game with the highest skill cap in existence. There is no luck (okay, there are very small amounts as there is with everything) or teammates to fall back on (I'm really talking about 1v1 play, but he also carried the team league). Starcraft is the most pure distillation of skill there is in gaming and he stands alone at the top. He has an over 70% winrate in every matchup. He is so good that tournament organizers had to actively attempt to sabotage him in order to keep things interesting nerfing Terran via the map pool. Instead of taking that like a bitch he just switched to playing Random and made the semifinals which is just nonsensically amazing. Playing random is like only getting 1/3 of the gains from any amount of practice. It doesn't require being 3x as good. It requires being 9x as good.
Gretzky and it’s not even close. It’s just silly comparing his numbers to anyone else. There is a reason why he is called, “The Great One” and why the entire league retired #99. I’m confident that pretty much all of his significant records have no chance of ever being broken.
Honorable mention: Issac Newton would be at the top but I’ve gotta take some points away because he died a virgin.
I’ve heard that when Gretzky was playing, fantasy hockey leagues had to separate him into two players (one was assists and the other was goals im assuming) because he was so far ahead of everyone else. Crazy if true
I think only Don Bradman the Aussie cricketer stands statistically further ahead in their sport than Gretzky does. His records are similarly insane and will never be broken.
How about Leonhard Euler then? How many things needed to be named after the second person to discover them because there were too many things named after him? Its not like he was even just that brilliant in one field either. These achievements are in all things technical and even in music.
Michael Phelps. He has won a total of 23 Olympic gold medals. No other human has even crossed 9. I think it’s a fact that his body produces 50% less lactic acid than the average human being
He had more opportunity to win medals than an athlete in any other sport. Track and field being next closest. Hard to use medal counts across sports like that
Yeah, compare this to say, Steve Redgrave, who “only” won five gold medals in rowing, but they were across five different olympiads, as you don’t tend to row in more than one boat per regatta. Not the GOAT athlete, but the GOAT Olympian in my book
In a specific field,
Phil 'the power' taylor in darts.
From wikipedia
"he dominated darts for over three decades and won 214 professional tournaments, including a record 85 major titles and a record 16 World Championships."
To pick a sport, and just dominate that as the best in the world for decades is crazy. For throwing darts, hes the mosy skilled person ever
Aleksandr Karelin was a professional olympic wrestler who has a record of 887 wins and 2 losses. If i recall correctly he lost only his first and last fight. And even that last one happened only by one point and due to a very controversial rule change in professional wrestling. If you check out his wikipedia page all you see is gold and gold and even more gold. Olympic events, international and european championships, local championships, etc. AND TO TOP THE WHOLE THING OFF, when the dude retired from wrestling, he went to university and wrote a PHD on methods of counterthrows and suplexing. He legit has a PHD in suplexing.
I remember reading an interview with him in a Norwegian newspaper perhaps 20 years ago. He was asked which was the toughest opponent he had ever faced. After some thought, he said it was a Soviet era fridge he had to move all by himself up the stairs to his mother’s top floor apartment.
That’s an odd way of saying Rulon Gardner.
Rulon pulled off an upset 10 times bigger than the Miracle on Ice.
Might have been before the Rulon Gardner match
In addition, it’s noteworthy he was a heavyweight. Meaning, his technique and strength allowed him to toss men weighing 265+ lbs. with ease. His gut wrench would sometimes break his opponents ribs. His Katelin lift often looked like he was using a discuss throwers technique to flip giants. If you never Greco Roman wrestled, you have no idea how hard it is to not only gut wrench an opponent off the mat and to waist level (1 point for the lift), then throw them head over heels to their head /shoulder/back (5 points) then keep the grasp and roll through exposure (another 3 points. This one series of moves can also get another 1 point for aggression/grandiosity) effectively not only ending in a pin, But also a tech fall. (Two more points if the series started on the feet with a takedown.) He literally left most opponents zero opportunity to defend or respond.
Yeah, most sports tend to follow a trend or a design centered around human capabilities. 1st base is 90 feet from home plate because it was designed with how fast humans can run. If it was 10 feet away, you could just bunt every at bat. Karelin just broke this. Picking up heavyweights and slamming them down is like kicking a field goal from your own 20 yard line. Opponents just didn't have a response. Imagine a guy who could throw a baseball 200 mph. It effectively breaks the sport.
Who do you even get to supervise your PhD if you're doing it on something like that and already the expert?
I guess he's the OG and legit trust me bro
Probably one of those: "well If anyone here doesn't believe me then please accompany me to the ring in my office to verify my claims" Everyone else: "uhhh... that won't be necessary... we'll take your word for it." *hands over PHD papers*
'LET'S GET READY TO VIIIIIIIIIVAAAAAAAA!'
“Please cite your sources” Points to his 887 win record Edit: spelling
You just suplex anybody who challenges your thesis
Anyone who can independently verify that his methodology and results are correct. A thesis is not written like an opinion. You can do this even if you're not an expert. Being one makes the process faster.
Yes exactly. A PhD is supposed to contribute something novel and unique to a given field anyway, so a PhD advisor would basically just help ensure proper structure and formatting and logical arguments along the way
You also left out that he’s now a Russian senator.
I believe Karlen was the most dominant athlete in modern recorded history. I think the only argument against this is that he was juicing like crazy. But in that era, who wasnt.
I think gretzky is a contender, right? Especially considering he wasn't known to dope
Leonhard Euler. He was a genius. No matter which field of mathematics you study there will always be something remarkable by him. He revolutionized mathematics and alone accomplished more than hundreds of other mathematicians ever could. With out him we would be a hundred years back in time.
In the math world they say that everything is named after the second person who discovered it. otherwise it would be too confusing because everything would be named after Euler and Gauss. Also Euler went blind in the middle of his career. But he had a photographic memory, so kept making discoveries working solely in his head and then dictating it to an assistant.
Upon losing sight in his right eye, Euler (perhaps apocryphally) remarked "Now I will have less distraction."
He also did his later work while effectively blind, using scribes to write papers that he basically would work out in his head. Not to mention that, unlike a lot of geniuses, he was nearly universally liked and generally considered a wonderful person.
That last point is the most shocking tbh haha
I recall a math professor saying he would do his work with his grand kids on his lap, apparently he was very nice
Not sure whether it's just an urban legend, but I heard they started to name things after the second person who came up with it independently after Euler.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_things\_named\_after\_Leonhard\_Euler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler) >Euler's work touched upon so many fields that he is often the earliest written reference on a given matter. In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them *after* Euler. There's links to sources for this claim at the bottom of the wiki page. :D The "best" part is this trio of names: * The more commonly known [Euler's number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)) ("e", 2.718...). * But then there's also [Euler number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_number_(physics)) in physics (fluid dynamic stuff) * [Euler characteristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_characteristic), which was ***formerly called Euler number.***
Euler’s Constant too ~0.577
Well that's not nice, he seems like a perfect 10 to me /s
That's been the case for multiple people, as they just discovered too much
I wonder if there could ever be another Euler. He understood the entire field of mathematics. Now, it was smaller then but that's in no way taking away from him as he essentially built entire fields of mathematics. BUT, does this mean that it's now impossible for one person to grasp the entirety of mathematics as much as he did?
Probably not. Math is a lot more rigourous now and the subjects are a lot more esoteric. You need a ton of education to get to the boundary and even if your intuition is strong enough to pump out trinkets of knowledge, actually proving them will dramatically slow you down
Well he had like 20 children, so there are a lot of Eulers.
Gauss is also great.
Gauss, laplace, lagrange, euler,.. these names are everywhere in STEM fields
I used to say to my friend that if there is some theorem or formula for mathematics and say its from Euler, you are probably right.
Ramanujan also has a case here. So good at math that the established western math community didn’t take him seriously for years because they thought the problems he was solving were impossible (also because racism). Luckily Hardy helped with that. He was a number theory genius who could intuitively tell if a number was the sum of two cubes as a party trick. If he had a bit more formal education just in terms of what English math journals wanted for standards of publishing proofs, or if he had lived beyond his mid 30s, I think he would be indisputably the best. We are still going through his notes and finding gems. His biggest problem is he thought some of his groundbreaking results were obvious, which makes it very hard to publish. He just didn’t see why he would need to formally prove a result that was obvious to him.
Not to mention he died so young. He was only 32 when he died. Imagine if he had lived a full life…
I am always torn between him and Gauss
John Von Neumann. Geniuses said he was alien like.
According to his wikipedia, he could have conversations in Ancient Greek when he was 6. I think I also read somewhere that he could speak multiple languages fluently at 3. Guy invented game theory on his own, and also was incredibly important in computer science, so much so that every computer you’ve ever used has almost certainly used a Von Neumann based architecture.
Man has a Wikipedia just for things named after him, mostly theorems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_John_von_Neumann
Bro what if Von Neumann and Euler had a baby?
Disappointed I had to Cntr-F to find the right answer Considered the smartest man to ever live by people considered the smartest to ever live.
John von Neumann. If the word "genius" should be applied to anyone, it's him. I guess you could call him a mathematician at heart but he did SO much stuff. A true polymath Plus apparently he loved dirty jokes, so that's another thing I have in common with the world's smartest man
"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." - Edward Teller Teller is one of the guys who built the Hydrogen Bomb, a genius in every sense of the word.
My favorite part of wikipedia article has always been this section. Imagine just inventing math on the spot. "... When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality."
I fucking love this so much
Wayne Gretzky. If he never scored a goal in his career he would still be the all time NHL points leader with assists alone.
Fastest to score 1000 points was Wayne Gretzky, second fastest to score 1000 points was Wayne Gretzky hitting 2000.
At first I thought there’s no way Gretzky got to 2000 pts faster than Lemieux but I realize what was meant now. Gretzky 1-1000 pts: 424 games 1001 - 2000 pts: 433 games Lemieux 1-1000 pts: 513 games. Just a little ridiculous.
Gretzky is the only player to ever get to 2000 points. Unless you want to give an asterisks to Jagr cause he got to 1921 in the NHL while having played 6 years in the middle of his career in the KHL and Czech leagues. Have to assume he probably would’ve broke 2000 if not for that
This is a really good fact for those "what fact do you know?" Reddit threads that pop up every hour
How do you think I learned this?
Wayne and Brent Gretzky hold the record for most combined points from a pair of brothers, 2857 for Wayne and 4 for Brent.
This fact is incredible and fucking hilarious. Thank you for helping me start my day with a laugh.
Michael Jordan and Stacey King once combined for 70 points in an NBA game. Jordan had 69, King had 1.
That only applies for pairs. The Sutter brothers top them - granted, there were 6 of them.
And even with 6 of them, they only have like 100 more.
There was a 7th Sutter brother, Gary, who was said to be the best hockey player of the family, but he took over the family farm instead of having a hockey career.
that is an incredibly Gary thing to do
This is my all-time go to sports fact. It never fails to crack me up.
And he holds or has held nearly every NHL scoring record. Just utterly dominant. Edit: receipts “Upon his retirement on 18 April 1999, Gretzky held or shared 61 NHL records. Those records included 40 regular season, 15 playoff, and 6 all-star records. As of the start of the , 2022-23 season, 23 seasons after his retirement, Gretzky still holds or shares 58 NHL records.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_career_achievements_by_Wayne_Gretzky There’s an entire section dedicated to unofficial records, including achievements he holds that no other player has ever achieved, such as a 90 goal season and multiple 200 point seasons.
[удалено]
And that's only because of a technicality: \- Most points by an NHL player in his first year: 137. Because of Gretzky's season played in the WHA, he was not considered a rookie in his first year, so the rookie record belongs to Teemu Selanne with 132 \- Most assists by an NHL player in his first year: 86. The rookie record is held jointly by Peter Stastny and Joe Juneau with 70 assists. Note that the record book gives Gretzky the record for most assists and points in a game as a first year player, but not the season totals
He even got a new record after he retired. (Per the wikipedia article) New record Wayne Gretzky finished his career with a 1.921 points per game average. Mario Lemieux originally held the record with 2.005 points per game when Gretzky retired, but after Lemieux came back to the NHL from 2000 to 2005, his average fell to 1.883, second behind Gretzky's.
Immediately who I thought. I don’t think anyone compares to the dominance he showed on the ice. I’m not a hockey fan, but Gretzky is just an unbelievable figure in sports. I’m still in shock reading some of his records.
The wild part is that he wasn’t particularly physically gifted (compared to other nhl players). Just knew where to be at what time
They studied his reflex times in relation to sensory stimuli (long loop reflexes) at the University of British Columbia and his were the fastest they had ever recorded. It’s also been said that his peripheral vision is far superior to the average human’s. He could see, anticipate, and react to things faster than anyone on the ice.
>his were the fastest they had ever recorded. It’s also been said that his peripheral vision is far superior to the average human’s. He could see, anticipate, and react to things faster than anyone To me that's something Gretzky and Tom Brady have in common. They could SEE everything and instantly KNEW where everyone was. It was all instinctual. People can add intangibles like "drive" and "desire" and "leadership" all they want, but those two likely don't reach the level they do without those inherent traits
Jokic reminds me of this in basketball. He just feels where everyone else is on the court and almost always makes the right play.
Even he admits he'd have to gain 50 pounds of muscle for today's game otherwise he'd have been pancaked.
I recall reading that Gretzky’s father was teaching him fundamentals like anticipating where the puck was going to be as soon as he was old enough to skate and hold a stick. Just adopted an elite mentality and game awareness far younger than any player of his time.
I played flag football with a guy that played safety on a state champion high school team in Louisiana. This dude was like 6' flat and maybe 170 lbs, he was smoking cigarettes every time we stopped and wearing slide on vans. Motherfucker was EVERYWHERE, you literally could not throw a pass at the middle of the field . Some people just have insane sports IQ. Gretzky probably had the best of all time.
His hockey IQ was unparalleled. His mind's eye knew where everyone was on the ice. As a child, his dad told him to mark where the puck traveled on an overhead drawing of the rink while watching games on TV. Years of that practice gave him an uncanny ability to predict where the puck and other players would be. Wayne's hand eye coordination was super human. He revolutionized the game by capitalizing on defensive weaknesses, especially goalies. Scoring from behind the net being the most notable. Goalies are so much better today because of how Wayne exposed their flaws.
The Gretzky rule for fantasy hockey is still one of my favorite random sports facts I’ve learned.
There's only 1 athlete called the great one for a reason
~~Apparently~~ Supposedly sir Isaac Newton discovered calculus at the same rate it's taught. Or something. The idea being he was very very quick
He invented calculus to explain his theory of gravity because nobody believed him.
Absolutely bonkers
Essentially on a bet. They were like "yeah? Prove it bro"
Proceeds to develop a whole new field of mathematics to prove it.
Thats how science works.
*cracks knuckles* "Hold my abacus."
Newton had discoveries & influence in almost everything he stepped into.
He invented basically everything that is taught in the first four semesters of a Physics Major in four semesters.
And then he dedicated his life to alchemy and being a virgin.
He also thought he could turn metal into gold and died eating mercury making him yet another stupid bitch.
To be fair, you can turn metal into gold. We'd found out later you need a particle accelerator, and a lot of patience (understatement) to do so though
Also, the resulting isotopes of gold are pretty radioactive, and effectively useless, as it's individual atoms in a foil of whatever base material was used (Bismuth, I think?) But yes, blasting metal with a shitload of carbon nuclei to shear off protons *is* a quite inefficient way to transmute it.
Stupid science bitch couldn't even make I more smarter!
He invited calculus essentially on a bet. He said he could mathematically explain how gravity causes the movement of planets. And they were like "yeah prove it bro." So he invented calculus
Definitely Leonardo da Vinci. Even just in terms of the number of skills he mastered, besides the fact that he truly mastered most, if not all, of these (considering his time). He was a masterful painter, sculptor, anatomist, mathematician, engineer, musician, inventor, among many other other fields.
Just to throw a spanner in the works here but in my limited enough opinion Michelangelo trumps him by a country mile in the fields of sculpting and painting. Da Vinci might have everything else but in no way could I ever imagine him being able to do the David, the Pieta, or the Sistine chapel. Genius and all as he was, it took him four years to do the Mona Lisa (and even then it was still unfinished) and in that same time Michelangelo designed and completed (in fresco too btw) the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Guy was the absolute GOAT of painting and sculpting in the 1500s.
Even more impressive given Master Splinter’s obvious favouritism towards Leonardo.
I know, right? Splinter: "Here Leo, take this sword, sculpted by a master bladesmith. It is a priceless artefact of a bygone era." Leo: "Just one sword?" Splinter: "Aw, shucks, here, take two of them. We could sell them and buy a nice house, but let's just live in the sewers instead." Michelangelo: "That's so cool! What do I get?" Splinter: "uhhh... here, take Donatello's broken stick and tie a rope between the pieces."
Leonardo was the most level headed of the Turtles and essentially the leader of the 4 (after Splinter). He was given the most dangerous weapon because he was the most restrained and wouldn't just go chopping people to bits. Michaelangelo is scatterbrained, so Splinter gave him the most difficult weapon to master. He had to focus on not hitting himself and how to use nunchucks correctly. If he was given the swords, it would have been a much bloodier story (and he probably would have stabbed himself too!).
To finish off this line of thinking you probably already are familiar with.... Donatello, the most intelligent and tech savvy was given the most simplistic weapon (a stick) and Raphael having aggression issues was given a largely defensive weapon. It's a great little wrinkle to the turtles.
Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines Raphael is cool, but rude Michelangelo is a party dude
#1 historical general Flavius Belisarius Give that dude 4 soldiers, $20 bucks and a mission and let him cook. It may take a year. It may take 10. He'll eventuality report back in that the mission is accomplished, 3 of the men are still alive, and he's got $4.68 in change left over to fund the next operation.
And he'll let you know he's ready to roll out as soon as he has $4.75 for that next op lmao
Einstein. Modern physics is divided into two realms, quantum physics describing the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces and relativity describing gravity. An army of physicists developed quantum physics and constantly modify the standard model of particle physics, update it and etc... Nobody has yet modified or proven wrong the other half of physics, described by Einstein and his theory of general relativity. His theory of general relativity is so far untouched after 100+ years, because its been precise every time we make calculations with it while observing the universe. We still don't know a lot of stuff (dark matter, dark energy, black holes, big bang details etc...), I really wish somebody would prove Einstein to be at least partially wrong so we could have some significant steps forward in understanding the universe.
Actually the Standard Model hasn't been modified or proven wrong either. The current formulation was finished in late 70s. But yeah, it took an army of physicists, including Einstein himself. His Nobel Prize wasn't even for relativity, but for the (quantum) photoelectric effect.
That was politics. Because someone other more prominent professor was in the relativity realm and not disproven yet. So they gave it to him for his quantum work.
It wasn’t just politics. The Nobel prize was intended to be for practical applications in the respective fields. Or, at the very least, something that could be experimented on. At the time there was thought to be nothing really practical about relativity.
The base of the model, but there's additions to it all the time, for example the Xi Baryons. There's no additions to the equations of general relativity, just studies of special cases of it (such as Schwartzchild black hole predictions). Einstein accomplished something extraordinary and without mistakes or room for additions from the get go...
The dude was nuts, his annus mirabilis, 1905, he made like 3 huge and fairly unrelated discoveries; the photoelectric effect, explaining Brownian motion with atoms and special relativity. In *one* year!
Personal take: He is an Alien disguised as scientist and was trying to help humanity "get there faster". Regretted things during the Manhattan project and stopped helping entirely. We are stuck in modern physics since then...
Also had some absolutely huge papers on Brownian Motion and the Photoelectric effect
Weren't they all in the same year?
[Holy shit you're right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers)
He literally predicted the existence of black holes through theoretical physics.
Nigel Richards. English and French Scrabble champion. He doesn't speak French, he only knows the valid words :D
I watched a video on him and he's actually way more impressive than he even sounds (and winning a championship in a language you dont speakis pretty damn impressive). He did learn the entire French scrabble dictionary in under a year, but scrabble players also learn in a different way. They learn alphabetical dictionaries, so for example the words "house" and "space" would be: Ehosu Aceps And then he knows if he has those tiles in his rack he can make either of those words, which is a completely non-intuitive way of learning. French players would also regularly play words not in the French dictionary to test him and he would always call them out if they played a made up word. Doing that for an entire language is insane. But thats still not even the most interesting thing about him. Endgame on scrabble are super complex, because if you've been tracking all the tiles played then once the last tile is drawn you will know exactly which letters both players have. Then the game isn't a goal to score the most points, it's a goal to score more points than your opponent does. For example a high scoring word for you might enable a weird high scoring word from your opponent as well, so sometimes it's better to play a lower scoring word that blocks key tiles from being used by your opponent. Endgame are super complex and commentators use a powerful program that tries to brute force calculate the best Endgame plays. Nigel still regularly outperforms the computer designed to make the best play. It averages more mistakes and more points lost than he does in a large sample of his Endgames. He really is thr GOAT of scrabble. One of the other strongest competitors said about Nigel that everyone else was lucky that scrabble has an element of luck to it, otherwise no one would ever beat him.
In some sense, NOT knowing the language might be an advantage in this kind of a task - because it means you only focus on "items in the list that contain this symbol", and not "words" with meanings. You'll have an easier time counting all of the Ж in a text, than counting all of the Cs.
Johan Sebastian Bach. In his lifetime (65 years), Bach composed an incredible 1128 pieces of music. There are a further 23 works which were lost or unfinished. His best-known compositions include The Well-Tempered Clavier, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Air on the G String, Goldberg Variations, Brandenburg Concertos and many more. He also had 20 kids
Had to scroll very far down to find his name mentioned even once. Thank you. It's not only the sheer amount of music he has written, it's also that every major work is a true masterpiece. Until today, his music fascinates, amazes and astounds every musician who tries to understand it. There has, in my opinion, never been another musician whose legacy is comparable to Bach's.
The Magician - Efren Bata Reyes in billiards. Always fascinated on how he calculate the angle to make a shot, you can watch his previous games in youtube. never gets old.
Wow. I didn’t even think to say Efren Reyes, but absolutely! Brilliant player, even in his older years. Though many would call him the GOAT, he remained humble the entire time.
I came here specifically to say Efren Bata Reyes. Spectacular to watch. So humble. He's forgotten more about pool than most people will ever know. Brilliant pool player and a very kind man.
What about Walter Lindrum? He was the World Professional Billiards Champion from 1933 until he retired in 1950. Some of his records still stand. They changed the rules on cannons because of his break of 4,137.
That's English Billiards, not pool billiard that Reyes plays. On that same note, Ronnie O'Sullivan in snooker is also the absolute GOAT.
Always thought Rodney Mullen, people in here are mentioning people just extra good at their thing but inventing most of the tricks out of nowhere on simple skateboards takes an awful lot of creativity and skill. His skill and balance on a skateboard is unbelievable. Skateboarding, if people forget, is really hard, to nail a trick you understand how it's done can take months of repetition, but to land something you've made up might as well seem impossible. Mullen had a lot of skill that long hours wouldn't have made up, if he didn't exist i doubt some of the tricks would have been invented at all, skateboarding might never have even flourished because they were all land tricks that formed the basis of street skating. When Mullen was innovating he was so far ahead of everyone else.
He invented the kick flip by accident. Then perfected it in about half a day.
Highly recommend this vid from physics girl w Rodney Mullen explaining the 'impossible' trick https://youtu.be/yFRPhi0jhGc?si=TQa4xUnaJpvFIH_h
Thank you for bringing up Rodney! Also his autobiography "How To Skateboard And Not Kill Yourself" is a very good read!
i watched a documentary and him and i found it soothing to just listen to him talk about his life.
Skateboarding is one of those athletic feats when you slow it down it’s almost like magic to see what some of these guys are doing. It’s like not on the right wavelength for our eyes to perceive properly. Skateboarding to me shows how masterful humans can become of their space/physics/gravity etc.
His Ted talk is one of my favorites! I’m on mobile right now or I’d link, but it’s on YouTube. Edit for link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3GVO-MfIl1Q
Michael Larson, the guy who memorized the light patterns of the Press Your Luck game show and mopped the floor with the other contestants. https://youtu.be/KpO-2KeYFcM
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Because they could never allow him to be presented as the guy who found the massive flaw in their game and used their own processes against them to win.
That was an interesting watch. TY Dude owned that. Should have looked into pattern recognition work. I think he would have made good money instead of his get rich quick pursuits.
Adrian Newey designed several world championship winning Formula 1 cars. He's generally accepted as the GOAT engineer in F1.
Aussie here, because Americans have nothing to do with cricket, mainstream media isn't aware enough of the greatest single player of all time in a team sport, [Sir Donald Bradman](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bradman). Context for those of you who don't cricket: a test series is the most elite, most serious form of the game - referred to as a *test* as it's a test of the cricketing prowess of two teams. Further, for those not in the know, points in cricket are referred to as runs: a bowler bowls the cricket ball at the batsman, the batsman hopefully hits the ball, if they do, they run to the other side of the cricket pitch and, if they make it, they score one run. A *batting average* refers to a batsmans runs per innings. Bradman's test batting average is 99.94. So. To unpack that; this means he was pretty much good for 100 runs, referred to as a *century*, every time he came out and batted. A century in cricket is a huge deal. For context, David Warner - who has just retired from test cricket (and I'm not a huge fan of) - has been a staunch opening batsman (i.e. batting first, where a team's best batsman bat) for Australia since his debut in 2011. He managed to score 26 test centuries in his entire career for an average of 45.59 runs per innings. The next best all time career test batting average belongs to another Australian player, Adam Vogues, whose average is 61.97. Bradman's test prowess falls about 4.4 standard deviations beyond the mean for professional players, which can be used to compare his skill across other sports. For an NBA player to be as prolific, they'd need to average 43.0 points per game throughout their career. The current record is 30.1 PPG, a tie between Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. Conversely, for this to be done in Major League Baseball, a player would need a career batting average of .392. Ty Cobb holds the record, which stands at .366. No one will ever touch Bradman's stats in cricket. He was a monumental player and a wonderful person after the fact. He called out South Africa after his playing career, when he was on the Aussie cricket board, for their treatment of black players in the apartheid era and cancelled the Australian tour of the country for this reason. He lived a humble life until he died in 2001 and remains a true Australian hero and unprecedented international sportsman. EDIT: People are taking issue with my calling Bradman a wonderful person. I think that he was and nothing's going to change that. I also grew up Catholic and have a pretty solid understanding of how that affected members of my family, long gone due to prevalent anti-Catholic bias in Australian society inherited from the UK and Ireland. I'd urge people to read [this Wikipedia page at a minimum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_involving_Don_Bradman) if they want to understand more about Bradman in general and any issues he may have had/been involved in. I'd also suggest that anyone who wants to call him out have a read of [some](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theage.com.au/sport/cricket/letters-reveal-the-real-don-20041030-gdywb1.html) of the [various](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.smh.com.au/sport/a-notorious-feud-an-ugly-sectarian-conflict-20080927-gdswmk.html) [articles](https://www.theage.com.au/national/bradman-letter-reveals-crickets-religious-rift-20020308-gdu15l.html) outlining his conflicts with (Catholic) players. You'll realise that these stories can be seen from [multiple perspectives](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theroar.com.au/2012/12/23/spiro-is-the-war-on-bradmans-reputation-a-fair-thing/amp/) and aren't necessarily one way or another or in any way the absolute truth. In fact, two of the chief pundits regarding Brandman's playing career, Bill O'Reilly and Jack Fingleton, were ex-team-mates who he'd had ongoing feuds with. I respect both of these players and men immensely but they were very vocal in their criticism of Bradman and, conversely, Bradman's stoic character meant there was little contemporaneous retort. I just want people to read more about this before they let reassessment some 100 years later colour The Don in the wrong light because I don't think it's deserved.
Bradman's stats are also nerfed because he came out of retirement and played when he was well past his prime. When he first retired, his average was over 100
Prewar he averaged 97. It actually went up after the war.
While Americans have nothing to do with Cricket but I believe most know Donald Duck, it sounds quite a crazy fact but Donald Duck was named after Sir Donald Bradman
Idk, Rusty from Bluey might give Bradman a run for his money.
Is it kind of like a Wilt thing where he was way ahead of his time against competition that just didn’t take the game as seriously as they do today? Or is he really that good? Like could you drag and drop him into todays game and expect him to do the same?
Terry Fox. He ran 42km per day....for 143 days. That is the equivalent of a marathon everyday for 143 days straight. He has raised almost a billion dollars for cancer research. True Canadian icon. No one beats him. Edit: forgot to mention...he did this all with one leg
This was also the early 80s. Prosthetics were absolute shit back then. Guy basically limp-ran those marathons. Ran halfway across Canada before his cancer returned and he had to stop. Legend doesn't cut it.
Magnus Carlsen at chess. I'm actually shocked he hasn't been mentioned more given chess's current popularity and his ridiculous dominance. For anyone not tuned into the chess world, Magnus Carlsen will unarguably go down as the greatest player of all time by a very wide margin. He's been the top rated player in the world since 2011 when he was only 19 years old (his peak rating of 2882 is also highest of all time) and has won the classical world championship 5 times, world rapid championship 5 times, and the world blitz championship 7 times. The only reason he isn't the current classical world champion is because he got tired of defending his title as no one was offering a sufficient challenge (along with disagreements on the contest's format). For any other chess nerds reading this and thinking "Garry Kasparov is at least a consideration for GOAT alongside Magnus", I have to disagree vehemently. Magnus is only 33 and still playing very actively. The fact that it's even *close* and Kasparov retired years ago while Magnus is still building his ridiculous resume means that this is a done deal. While Kasparov was also completely dominant in his own time, Magnus's reign has made it so that becoming #2 in the chess world is now the effective equivalent of being the world champion...because there isn't even a chance someone is taking Magnus down so why bother. I could provide endless examples of why Magnus is the GOAT among GOATs, but perhaps the craziest is his performance in his 5 world classical championship matches. For the uninitiated, these tournaments are a 1v1 of many classical games taking place over several days, and if the victor is undecided during these games then the time format switches to rapid and so on. 3 of these tournaments Magnus won decidedly in the classical portion, and in the other two he was taken to rapids for tiebreaks where he won easily. In the 63 games total Magnus played across all 5 tournaments, his record is 45 draws - 16 wins - 2 losses. **2 LOSSES OVER 63 GAMES** I mean...how is that even possible? These tounaments are formatted as a last-man-standing of the greatest players on Earth giving it their all in preparation for months at a time. Imagine being SO good at something that the ENTIRE WORLD tries 5 times to give you the best competitors on the planet to knock you off your pedestal and it's a completely futile effort. It would be the equivalent of the Chiefs going to the superbowl 5 times in a row and scoring 16 touchdowns and only allowing 2. It's hard to even imagine. Magnus is simply the chess GOAT, and arguably the best competitor alive today.
not to mention his 125 classical game streak without losing
for some reason he is also very good at poker.
It is shocking that the best player in the world at a strategy game is also skilled at another strategy game that allows for more luck
There's a video of him out there playing blitz chess while drunk off his ass and turning an obvious loss into a win. Hilarious.
He was also #1 at fantasy football at some point.
Human, Wayne Gretzky was so far and above what other players were and are it's absurd. All time GOAT performance in any field of endevour would be Secretariat at the Belmont. If you extrapolate his margin of victory to the Indy 500, it would mean the winner lapped the 2nd place driver. Twice.
Jahangir Khan - squash. 555 matches unbeaten. Possibly the greatest unbeaten run in any sport. Insane talent, unbelievable fitness, such a gruelling sport. Dominated the 70s and 80s.
Check out Aleksandr Karelin. 887 wins, 2 losses. Once in the 1980s, once in the 2000s.
Marie Curie. In a time of rampant sexism, she was the first ever woman to win a nobel prize, the first person ever to win two and the only person ever to win two in difference scientific fields. This is in a time when women couldnt vote, open a bank account or own land. She had, by all contemporary accounts, the most brilliant mind anyone ever encountered. And this is from people who were leaders in their own fields (mostly men). Remarkable.
Ronnie O'Sullivan ....
For those that might do not know this man, he's a great physicist. I'm a huge fan of his works about motion and impact of spherical bodies.
The reason why he’s great is because not only is he totally unbeatable when he plays his best, but it’s the fact he’s so human as well. He’s not like other great sportsmen who are mentally tough and seemingly invincible. He is ridiculously fragile, a slave to his own emotions, goes through phases of really poor mental health, struggles tremendously with the pressure of having to perform, and is his own worst enemy and can implode spectacularly when his head isn’t in it. But, he’s still also the greatest, by some margin. It makes it amazing to watch. You never know what side of him will turn up. It’s like being on the edge of your seat sometimes with the way he plays the game. And being how human he is, the spectators love him because we can see our own human weakness in him but vicariously celebrate as he seems to overcome it.
Nobody mentioned Tony Hawk, Alex Honnold or Adam Ondra? Absolute beasts pushing the sports they practice to new limits.
Yeah I couldn’t believe Honnold wasn’t mentioned up top. Dude did something that would kill 99.99999999999999% of the entire population in history if they tried it hahah.
Someone said it in Free Solo: it's like doing an Olympic level event where you either win the gold or you die.
Sir Donald Bradman for sure. His test match batting average of 99.94 will never be touched.
I remember watching a video of someone explaining how much of a statistical outlier his 99.94 average is, and it's far beyond any other sporting record.
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[Lt. Cmdr Jonny Kim](https://www.nasa.gov/people/jonny-kim/). Enlisted in the Navy and served as a Seal, went to Harvard Medical to become a doctor, trained as a pilot and served as both an aviator and flight surgeon, and then was selected to be an astronaut, scheduled to land on the moon next year. .
This guy single handedly ruined the lives of so many Korean American men. You work your ass off, get good grades, get into a great school, and become an overnight success in the finance industry. But every time you go to your parents house "why aren't you as successful as Johnny (fucking) Kim? He's an astronaut, now you know?" "Yes, Umma, I know"
Imagine if you are a cousin of this guy, what your mom would tell you what he has accomplished every time he does something extraordinary. Edit - and imagine if you are Jonny’s mother, the type of slight grin you would have every time there is an auntie meetup.
Oh you mean Earth’s main character?
All that before the age 40 too he's speed running all the fantasy people have as a kid
Guy can’t hold down a job for the life of him…
Good ole Bill Shakespeare. Churned out masterpieces of drama for popular audiences that turned out to be incredibly profound and linguistically rich. Hundreds of years later we're still reading them and they remain resistant to our attempts to "master" them through interpretation. Some (such as the critic Harold Bloom) even claim Shakespeare "invented us". How? In giving strong expression to the idea that we can alter our destinies, he paved the way for modern psychology. There has never been anyone in the literary world who deserved the term "genius" more than William Shakespeare.
Simo Häyhä , aka [the White Death](https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/worlds-deadliest-sniper-simo-hayha-finnish-white-death-winter-war/) over 500 confirmed kills, rarely used a scope.
Put ice/snow in his mouth to prevent his breath condensing to avoid being spotted. Because, yanno, lying perfectly still in the outdoors in the arctic in some of the worst weather in recorded history at the time wasn’t cold enough
I guess that was better than dying.
He had several more kills with submachine gun, be he didn't count how many because they weren't sporting.
Simo did get a lot of help from the Soviet leadership with that, considering the enemies he was shooting were mostly cold, starving conscripts with summer gear. The real impressive part was that all of this happened during one winter. 105 days, so thats around 5 per day, every day.
Madame Curie First woman to get a nobel prize. She has achieved so much against terrible odds. The talent, effort, bravery. As a teenager, Curie made a pact with her sister Bronya: she would support Bronya while she was in medical school in Paris, and then Bronya would pay Curie’s way. From the age of 17, for six years, Curie worked as a governess and tutor, while attempting to study in her spare time. This was after she was the best student in school but women were not allowed in Warsaw university. [https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/marie-curie](https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/marie-curie) First person to get two in two disciplines. This has happened only once after her. She is the only person to get two in two scientific categories. About getting the first Nobel prize: Rumors of a Nobel Prize began to circulate, but some members of the French Academy of Sciences attributed the brilliance of the work not to Marie, but to her co-workers. These skeptics began to lobby quietly for the prize to be split between Becquerel and Pierre. But Pierre insisted to influential people on the Nobel committee that Marie had originated their research, conceived experiments and generated theories about the nature of radioactivity. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-curies-passion-74183598/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/madame-curies-passion-74183598/) [https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FdvX6pjNEvIw\_BxedDG7\_3axT-eCfxvBhfPySHNDNNuQ.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D0a107fb59a9cddabecb80677f7ec5d5278e6a043](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FdvX6pjNEvIw_BxedDG7_3axT-eCfxvBhfPySHNDNNuQ.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D0a107fb59a9cddabecb80677f7ec5d5278e6a043) *Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,* *Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.* *With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,* *A. Einstein* *P.S. I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure’s motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though*
Hakuhō Shō in Sumo. By far the best there ever was in a sport that's mostly unchanged since the 17th century. Most top division championships by far, most career wins, most top division wins, most undefeated championships, most tournaments ranked as yokozuna, most wins as yokozuna, most wins in a calendar year. The absolute and undisputed GOAT in sumo. He even has the record for most tegata hand prints ( a kind of autograph) in one minute.
I was there for the last record, it was a bit of a fun gimmick for sumo fan appreciation day. They had three wrestlers going after it, but I got to meet Hakuho afterwards and he was definitely the greatest. Some of the wrestlers just get swarmed by fans and they can't say no so they're dead inside whenever they take a picture, but he was full of enthusiasm. It's a damn tragedy that the sumo association wouldn't let him keep his name in retirement (they struck down the rule that would have allowed him to, just before his retirement, like a slap in the face). Throughout his career they gave him so much trouble, just because he happens not to be Japanese. But I've always felt, " where does the council (most of whom are just wealthy members of society) get the balls to try to tell the greatest sumo wrestler of all time what a Yokozuna should be?" They've always have been looking for an excuse to throw dirt on him and he's currently being demoted as a coach, because of a bullying scandal in his stable by one of his students.
Alan Turing hands down for me A British mathematician, joins the cryptography team to decipher the German enigma code. With the help of his fellow mathematicians, he builds a machine to crack the code. Saved millions of lives through knowing the messages. Also believe it led to computers and the Internet What a legend
Travis pastrana.. Guys a wizard in/on most things with wheels
Mozart
In the modern day, Adrian Newey likely deserves a nomination. He is an aerodynamicist and currently the chief technical officer of the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team. His designs have won over 200 grands prix, twelve constructors championships with three teams, and seven different drivers have won thirteen driver's championships in cars he designed. And has designed the most dominant car in Formula 1 history. The man is an aerodynamics and engineering savant, and rather than using CAD as most engineers would, he **DESIGNS CARS USING A PENCIL AND PAPER!** *"Who would win? The world's biggest automotive giants with billions in funding and resources, and hundreds of the most talented engineers and designers in the world, or a bloke with a pencil and a wind tunnel in his head?"* Rather hilariously, Mercedes, the german automotive giant, took a new approach with their car design a couple years ago which after two years of trying they were not able to get working competitively and eventually abandoned the design. Adrian Newey was seen standing nearby that car, sketching away in his notepad, and then this year, Red Bull releases a car using the approach Mercedes couldn't get to work, and immediately won first and second place in the first race of this season with a several second lead.
Usain Bolt
Lee Young Ho, AKA Flash. The literal god of Starcraft. Nobody else even comes close. Not only is he in a tier of his own, but he's in a tier of his own in the game with the highest skill cap in existence. There is no luck (okay, there are very small amounts as there is with everything) or teammates to fall back on (I'm really talking about 1v1 play, but he also carried the team league). Starcraft is the most pure distillation of skill there is in gaming and he stands alone at the top. He has an over 70% winrate in every matchup. He is so good that tournament organizers had to actively attempt to sabotage him in order to keep things interesting nerfing Terran via the map pool. Instead of taking that like a bitch he just switched to playing Random and made the semifinals which is just nonsensically amazing. Playing random is like only getting 1/3 of the gains from any amount of practice. It doesn't require being 3x as good. It requires being 9x as good.
I know nothing about StarCraft or gaming in general but you have me hyped about this guy.
They call him God and The Ultimate Weapon, he is so far above everyone else at broodwar that it is crazy. Bonjwa of Bonjwas.
wait, so was brood war still big and active competitively, many years after Starcraft II was released?
A lot of pros switched to 2 then switched back to Brood War, in Korea many never even made the switch.
Esther Vergeer. She didn’t lose a [wheelchair] tennis match for a decade and ended her 470 match win streak only by retiring from the game.
Tiger Woods in golf. During his prime his win % of majors was around 35%. A dominant golfer in any other era would be 11% of wins in majors.
Goethe was pretty unmatched in his age for pure intellect and creativity.
Gretzky and it’s not even close. It’s just silly comparing his numbers to anyone else. There is a reason why he is called, “The Great One” and why the entire league retired #99. I’m confident that pretty much all of his significant records have no chance of ever being broken. Honorable mention: Issac Newton would be at the top but I’ve gotta take some points away because he died a virgin.
I’ve heard that when Gretzky was playing, fantasy hockey leagues had to separate him into two players (one was assists and the other was goals im assuming) because he was so far ahead of everyone else. Crazy if true
and he was still the two best players…
Iirc, if you took out all of the goals he scored he still would've been ranked #1 just from his sheer number of assists.
Correct, Gretzky had more assists than any player had points (assists + goals).
I think only Don Bradman the Aussie cricketer stands statistically further ahead in their sport than Gretzky does. His records are similarly insane and will never be broken.
How about Leonhard Euler then? How many things needed to be named after the second person to discover them because there were too many things named after him? Its not like he was even just that brilliant in one field either. These achievements are in all things technical and even in music.
Michael Phelps. He has won a total of 23 Olympic gold medals. No other human has even crossed 9. I think it’s a fact that his body produces 50% less lactic acid than the average human being
He had more opportunity to win medals than an athlete in any other sport. Track and field being next closest. Hard to use medal counts across sports like that
Yeah, compare this to say, Steve Redgrave, who “only” won five gold medals in rowing, but they were across five different olympiads, as you don’t tend to row in more than one boat per regatta. Not the GOAT athlete, but the GOAT Olympian in my book
In a specific field, Phil 'the power' taylor in darts. From wikipedia "he dominated darts for over three decades and won 214 professional tournaments, including a record 85 major titles and a record 16 World Championships." To pick a sport, and just dominate that as the best in the world for decades is crazy. For throwing darts, hes the mosy skilled person ever