Obviously Einstein was a brilliant man but I've gotten the impression he was "2nd tier" when compared to some of his contemporaries like Poincaré and von Neumann. Confirm/deny?

I'm not a physicist, but this guy reinvented physics using thought experiments that were later proved to be extremely accurate.

That's just relativity, but he also did groundbreaking work on atoms and light, and he even designed an interesting new refrigeration cycle.

It's not really possible to say how much raw intellectual power goes into solving a problem (yet), so it's hard to compare giants like Poincare, von Neumann, and Einstein.

Still, Einstein's mind was clearly first-rate.

Right, his mind was first rate but in a dog-eat-dog life, so much more goes into it. I find them all very interesting characters and I'd like other people's thoughts on the narrative I've crafted of their lives and interactions.

I don't even understand how its possible to think this.

He revolutionized classical physics, made huge advancements in the brand new field of quantum mechanics (unwillingly at first) and made tons of very interesting philosophical works.

It could be I am way out of my depth here, but it seems to me someone like Von Neumann was certainly above Einstein. Von Neumann was an S-tier intellect, truly astonishing.

I don't know enough about Einstein to say whether or not he was also an S-tier, but I have often heard it said that someone would have figured out the stuff he is most famous for if he hadn't been there. Because others were working on similar math. And I've also read about Von Neumann just solving unsolvable things on whim, inventing new concepts whole cloth that weren't even the focus of his work, etc.

Nobody could say Einstein wasn't brilliant, but his being famous doesn't mean he was the most brilliant. For that matter, we should acknowledge that the smartest person to have ever lived might have died without ever touching a pencil, because we still use "being born in the right place" as a proxy for greatness. Should we ever meet the basics needs of everyone and to allow every mind to flourish, we might find our greats are less rare than we thought.

Thank you, this is precisely what sort of conversation I was trying to elicit. If anything, realizing that Einstein's intellect, while tremendous, is something we can wrap our heads around. He always seemed like a quality, if a bit unfocused, academic who managed to put himself in the right places at the right times and accomplished tremendous things as a result. A testament to the fact that one doesn't have to be a von Neumann level genius to affect science in earth shattering ways.

> I don't even understand how its possible to think this.

Are you intending to come across as so rude? Because I'd say this sounds like your problem. Perhaps English isn't your first language, so I'll forgive your tone.

Anyway, it seems apparent to me that an academic who struggles to land a job researching or teaching after graduation is not "top tier", but as a non-academic, perhaps I misunderstand.

Famously, the man didn't fully understand the mathematics (tensor calculus and differential geometry) required to flesh out his obviously profound ideas about general relativity, so he learned them, and then proceeded to change how we think about the universe. It's completely fascinating the drive and effort required for such a thing.

I realize the profundity of the photoelectric effect, but I've read that had Einstein not figured out relativity that Poincaré wasn't far behind. Also, Einstein commented that he felt von Neumann was the "cleverest man" that he had ever known so curious what these guys thought of Einstein? I like to imagine it rather like the tensions between impressionist musicians where Einstein is the scrappy Satie and the establishment try-hards like Ravel are smugly casting judgment on his lofty ambitions, but this may not be correct.

I maintain that I am asking a fair question about how he compared to his contemporaries.

There's vision / creativity and then there's raw compute & storage power and the ability to cross-reference. Einstein seems first rate in category #1 but 2nd rate in #2. VNeumann is maybe a decent candidate for smartest human ever, in terms of category #2.. he was a prodigy staggering adults with math/linguistic feats of strength at a point in development when Einstein was probably still stuttering. But being intuitive has it's own advantages and it takes all kinds of people to build our vast wealth of knowledge.

The thing that fascinates me about Von Neumann is his apparently "normal" personality given his savant nature. Dude liked to do earth shattering work in front of the TV and was quite a friendly, if not a bit socially awkward, person.