In this sense, I like to think of "genius" as the application of enormous potential to extraordinary effect. Someone who qualifies for Mensa membership has been gifted with great potential. But if he sits on his ass and fritters his life away watching television, he can't be called a genius. Conversely, someone like Richard Feynman, with his 122 IQ, would not have qualified for Mensa, but produced magnificent work.
IQ seems somewhat correlated, but hardly sufficient, to qualify someone for the calling (and label) of genius. Genius is the result of action. It is the realization of potential. IMO, we need to get back to using lower-case "genius" to describe people's work, and away from capital-G "Genius" to describe people.
Real artists ship, after all.
I propose this definition: A genius is someone who, through their work, insipres the masses to take part in their field.
Because lets face it, your not a genius until everyone agrees you are a genius. Therefore, in order to be a genius you must make affect the masses.
In one of the Feynman books, a colleague said something like: With most really smart people, when they explain something to you, you get can it and think to yourself "I could of thought of that, if I was smarter." But with Feynman's work, even after you understood it, you'd think "How in the world did he come up with this?!"
"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre."
The condition for membership of Mensa is that you score "at or above the 98th percentile on certain standardised IQ or other approved intelligence tests" [1]. I don't think it makes sense to refer to the 140 million potential members of Mensa as "geniuses" no matter what your definition of genius is.
Also, if it's true that Richard Feynman's IQ was around 122, then he wouldn't have qualified for membership of Mensa.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Membership_...
Just for a second this gave a lesser mind like me some hope, but this IQ test may have been stressing verbal over mathematical ability.
"Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstei...
James Gleick. (1992). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.
Worth reading: (http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to...)
I mean, there is no end of literature by highly skilled people who offer general opinions on how to do a good job. Noam Chomsky, Rich Hickey, Jerry Lettvin, George Polya, Bertrand Russell, and Terence Tao are common examples. (Well, Chomsky is a bit different in that he shies away from individual advice, believing in diversity and improved societies, but if you look closely, he does offer advice like, maybe paraphrasing a little, "Allow yourself to be confused.") But I suppose "Ideas on doing a Good Job" doesn't poke at people's desires for validation as much as "How to be a Genius."
Unfortunately, aside from being excessively wordy and light on supporting evidence for some of its assertions, it suffers from the same problem as this article and most of the comments here: people can't agree on what a genius is.
Debates about the foundations of genius are meaningless until we get a better idea of what a genius is. Some people, like this article's author, try to limit the term just to those people in history that have made significant advances in some field or another. But, then they cherry-pick their examples, usually from a list of their personal heroes, and then try to draw some conclusions from that.
Feynman wasn't a household name until really just a few years ago. Citing him as an example of a genius, and then going further to say that he was ("acknowledged by many to be") the last great American genius, is supremely silly. There are brilliant people right now working in every field; what do you think the odds are that, many years from now, after their death, at least one of them might be regarded as a genius by someone writing next century's version of this same article?
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses, who even have a very serious test to keep out all of the non-geniuses. Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not?
If we're going to spend any time on utterly vacuous navel-gazing like this ... I think we ought to at least agree first on a useful definition for the thing we're trying to discuss.