>smartest (wo)man in the world

>Apparently this is old news but I guess I hadn’t been paying attention. Everyone knows that Stephen Hawking has been considered the smartest man in the world, but apparently the torch is passing. Daniel Tammet self-identifies as a prodigious savant, and it is, by his description, often as much a disability as it is a superability. Daniel has serious social issues, he says. He had epilepsy as a child and he thinks it might be that the seizures he had as a child that triggered a malformation of the brain. It’s interesting because he pathologizes his intelligence – it’s just a genetic fact, doesn’t make him better than anyone else, just born in a particular way that can be quite a challenge. He has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as well and he has real problems socializing. Daniel partly sees himself as an activist for savants and Asperger-prone people. Daniel is also a homosexual, and lives with his boyfriend in France. Daniel made this movie, which discusses the synesthesia that Daniel has, which allows him to see colors in place of numbers and compute incredible sums.