Clever Idea: Making A Genius

What do Dolly Parton, Osama Bin Laden and Professor Stephen Hawking have in common?

Well, according to a new survey they are all geniuses.

The trio are not the only surprises on a list of the 100 greatest living geniuses produced by British management consultants Synectics. They are joined by intellectual heavyweight Mohammad Ali, Spiderman creator Stan Lee and Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino.

The list is topped by 102 year-old chemist Albert Hoffman and World Wide Web inventor Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee.

They were joined in the top five by American financier George Soros, Simpsons cartoonist Matt Groening and Nelson Mandela.

Other geniuses came from the fields of science, mathematics, the arts, engineering, economics and, in the case of the Dalai Lama (number 26 on the list), spirituality.

The list, seen by some commentators as a dumbing down of the term genius, has 19 musicians but just 15 scientists.

"The more I have pondered on genius, the more I have become convinced that it holds a great secret," said Nigel Clarke, managing partner at Synectics.

"It certainly fascinates us. And, for many, it is the greatest accolade that can be attributed to a person."

The western bias of the selection panel is evident from the nominations made. America is the home to most geniuses with 43 entries on the list. Britain is next with 23, but there are just 11 Asians and only one African.

The Criteria

Synectics surveyed 4,000 individuals to create the list. Each person was asked to nominate 10 people they considered a genius. This was then presented to a panel of six experts in the field of creativity and innovation. A shortlist was created, and the 100 geniuses were ranked in order of paradigm shifting, popular acclaim, intellectual power, achievement and cultural importance.

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