People You Suspect Are Frighteningly Overrated But Don't Actually Know Enough About To Say So

Although I do like Rufus Wainwright too. I think Ned secretly does as well.

A bit long distance to respond to this, but in a word -- no.

(also: visual and performance artists, writers, people in film and tv, poets, novelists, people who make creepily kitsch folk art on the sides of rural route 9, people who make video games [producers? what the hell do you call these people?], singer-songwriters...)

bah!

If it's not too much trouble all the same, could you explain how, in the strange universe you call home, Gauss manages to come out overrated?

If it's not too much trouble all the same, could you explain how, in the strange universe you call home, Gauss manages to come out overrated?

what?? of course mathematicians can be over/under-rated. were i to rate gauss the worst mathematician ever i'd be underrating him; were i to rate myself the best ever i'd be (dramatically) overrating myself.

My point, toby_gee, is that mathematicians find out what's already there, whereas nearly everybody else aims to create what wasn't there before. Elsewhere, one can argue "someone else would have done it if he hadn't", but this is a truism in math, not a point of debate. It makes no sense to canonize people working in an essentially impersonal field. Things are different even in the physical sciences-- Relativity, for example, is one person's vision of the world that has so far been supported by data. But just watch, Einstein's number may be up any day now.

Its amazing how really good mathematicians believe that all of maths is almost a priori and that they did not infact derive all of maths from first principles themselves but rather they were taught how to do it. Good mathematicians therefore make lousy maths teachers.

Fermat is a massively over-rated mathematician, for being sloppy in a margin he is awarded this romantic position in Maths. Galois ditto - just because they died in interesting manners doesn't make their maths any better. (Galois Theory = k-important but that it should be named after him is a bit less sure).

Russell was an under-rated mathematician. Just cos he and Whitehead were wrong...

Starry: you have made an idiot of yourself.

Edna: I think you mean 'James Wood'.

Something about the question is flawed. If you truly feel that sth is overrated, then you already feel that you know enough to know.

Actually - Derrida.

*backs away w/o sudden movements*

Most of the time, "genius" is a term for people who simultaneously impress and confuse. All it marks is a refusal to doubt or understand on the part of whoever applied it. Not unlike terming a work of art "a masterpiece" and stowing it in a vault so that it will never be subject to criticism. A mathematician can do very useful work, but I don't think there is any big scheme in which to rank it. Not only will someone make his discoveries if he does not; someone may also make them with equal or much greater efficiency. Ramunajan (sp?) probably had an intuitive understanding of certain areas that far surpassed Gauss', but that doesn't make him the "greater" of the two.

I think I understand the criteria by which Gauss and friends are rated, disagree though I may with them, and still wonder why you consider him higher-rated than he should be. Or were you being iconoclastic for its own sake?

Aren't random googlers funny?

I liked jel's nomination way back of "gothic archies". Would that be the comic where Betty & Veronica become vampires?

(ha. most of the discussion works so far if for mark s Gauss= Coltrane)

Before you try refuting me: are you just a skeptic, or do you have any beliefs of your own about this?

'just' a skeptic!!!!!

The other day I tipped thrice the cost of my coffee in an embarrassed math-panic, so to answer your arch-villainish challenge, falsecrux: no I'm quite out of my league. And yes thanks I get it; math isn't art. Still, in my experience, after "artistic causality" comes a not insignificant amount of reasoning which FITS EXACTLY the criteria by which you discount the idea of genius above. I am skeptical only of the implication that mathematicians are continually calculating from birth, that something doesn't point them down a particular path of reasoning at a given point in time, and that that something may not be called "inspiration".

(I gather this makes me something called a platonist, which can't be good. When i master the craft of the generous-but-not- ridiculous gratuity perhaps i will grow more pragmatic in these more complicated matters too)

And you talk to me about Platonism...

What is art, then? A component of all imaginable universes? Divine aesthetics made manifest? Something other than accident? This would make the over-/underrated distinction a lot simpler, I have to admit.