Smart women

[Anomalocaris]

Focus Magazine

With an IQ of 228 (190 in some sources), Marilyn vos Savant is not only the most intelligent women in the world (which is confirmed by Guinness Book of World Records), she is also the most intelligent person in history!

to say she is the person with the highest IQ in history is a little bit like saying a certain creature is the largest in history merely because none bigger has been found amongst fossil record

It might not be possible to definitively rule it out for the time being.   But it is possible to say that it is overwhelmingly unlikely to be true,  because evidence shows the range of IQ of human population likely hovered around the present range for at least several thousand, if not tens of thousands of years.   The chance that the most extreme outlier on what has essentially been the same distribution would so happen to live during our time is very small.  

So to pretend it is sufficiently likely to be true to support a positive claim to that effect is intellectually very dishonest and crassly sensationalistic.

[Anomalocaris]

I would go with Hypatia, the librarian at the Library of Alexadria...apparently not so wise with regards to fire protection. (and sorry to all about my thoughtless comment above.)

I don't disagree that Hypatia was a smart woman.

But most of the library had been burned before she was born, in collateral damage from raids on the city by Julius Caesar. In her time, what remained of the books were housed in the Serapeum, a temple to Serapis with which Hypatia had no connection. 

She was a Neoplatonist who thought that the goal of life is to reconnect the fallen soul with the transcendent One, so if she were posting here people would call her an idiot. 

Sorry to be picky about history, but this misinformation gets repeated all the time.

no, hypatia would not have been considered an idiot because she was a platonist in the 4th century.   

However, the person who argue a modern woman who can have all of accumulated knowledge since hypatia time at her own finger tips nonetheless can’t think soundly though the issues of reality without falling back on Hypatia, mainly because, and to be frank to show off the fact that, he himself by chance had read some abstract of Hypotia,  in other words a person very much like yourself, can certainly lay rightful claim to the attributes of pompousness, conceit, self importance, lack of perception, and above all that of an verbose idiocy.     When that person to also insinuate others here would have considered Hypatia less accomplished for not rising completely above a much more primitive time, certainly entitles him to also claim the attributes of passive aggressiveness and tendency to libel. 

And by the way, the state of the library of Alexandria in Hypatia’s time is largely unrelated to Caesar’s actions in Alexandria.   It appears modern scholar believe much of the Library of Alexandria’s collections during its early Ptolemaic prime had been dispersed by beginning of 1st century BC, Caesar is believed to have burned only a storage warehouse for the library on the water front, not the remaining main library collection.   The relatively low impact of Caesar’s actions is shown by the fact that 22 years after Caesar’s burning the collection appears to have been restored.  During the imperial era the library then experienced long decline due to chronic neglect of lack of support from Rome, so that by beginning of the third century it had largely stopped functioning as a library and its collection again dispersed, before christians burned it in the 390s.   However, it is by no means clear that during the early to mid imperial era, the actual library of Alexandria did indeed still contain a collection unusual for the Roman Empire.    The Alexandrian library may have remained much more a symbol than an exceptional functioning library to warrant special imperial support.

the difference between christian’s and caesar with regard to burning down the library is of course caesar did not set out specifically to burn any content of the library.  the christians on the other specifically set out to destroy the symbol that the library remained, even if the books were likely all gone by then.