“It’s Really Creepy”: 59 Times Someone’s Intelligence Was Impressive And Freaky At The Same Time

My father was an Ichthyologist. The amount of information he knew about fish from all over the world was amazing. In our main fish store (1,000 salt and freshwater tanks), we had a "fish hospital" where people would bring their beloved 10 cent goldfish or $500 exotic fish to be healed! They were isolated in a separate room with pH tests, medications, etc.

It seemed so normal as an 80's kid - but now that I write this it seems crazy (people don't even have fish tanks any more).

A guy that I used to play poker with in college got really, really good after he left school. So good that he breezed his way through the Ohio Poker Championship help at one of the Cincinnati area casino riverboats (I forget which one.) It was a three day tourney (sometime around 2005 or 2006) and I remember talking with him both of the first two days on the phone after they halted action for the day. He was reading really well and of course, catching some cards.

I ended up skipping classes that day to hang with him during the final round. Every two hours or so we'd catch a smoke and talk strategy outside the room. He was onfire that day - I've never seen anyone play better poker over a six hour period than him that day. Keep in mind, I beat this guy out of several grand during the year I spent at Ohio State. He used to be my whipping boy and here he is lighting dudes up.

The most ultimate hand was him heads up against a guy at the end of the table. My friend had been reading this guy so well for two days - just OWNING him. During the hand the guy is betting into my friend, and on fourth street and fifth street my friend calls both bets. Now, if you know much about poker you know that it's never good if you're just calling a guy. Generally you want to be the one pushing the action - you want to be the one raising or folding, never just calling. But call is exactly what my friend did on the last two rounds of betting. They were pretty hefty bets too.

At the end he flips up his hand and says, "Queen high. That's good, right?" as confidently as I've ever heard him. The guy at the end of the table just crumpled in his chair. My friends busted him a few hands later and ended up winning the tourney (and 50k) later that afternoon.

In a classical mechanics lecture, our lecturer wanders in and tells us about a girl he was walking behind whose pony tail was swinging back and forth. He then proceeded to determine the resonant frequency of oscillation of the pony tail and the derive the forcing frequency of her walking to determine how close she was to oscillating her ponytail at resonance...like a baws.

I once had a friend who managed to top the entrance exams of the Philippines top 3 universities. He literally made our valedictorian look cute.

I don't know her in person, technically, but a friend of mine of a few years online is, quite probably, a genius. She is a chemist, with a PhD now -- I'm fairly certain she'll win a Nobel prize someday. What really impressed me, though, wasn't her Chemistry stuff, since I didn't know any of that, but her amazing language learning skills. I was a Japanese major, and she had a passing interest. She decided to learn some kanji from memrise, and in two or three weeks, she had learned enough kanji for a student who had studied three years of Japanese at high school. A few more weeks and she had learned enough for the international Japanese Standard, level two -- around ~1000 different characters. Keep in mind she didn't know ANY grammar -- she was just purely remembering the characters. A few weeks later she was actually reading Chinese perfectly well (since Chinese is 100% kanji) -- and not even that, but also Classical Chinese. Perhaps the smartest person I have ever known. Also, she has a couple novels completed, and the ideas in them are always absolutely genius. She was also our Game Master in roleplaying frequently and did some really interesting scenarios.

Another good candidate is my university professor. He has about eight or nine different degrees and speaks around ten languages: English, Japanese + Classical Japanese, Chinese + Classical Chinese, Korean + Classical Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish... he was our Classical Japanese teacher, and he would quite calmly explain grammar points in Chinese, and then turn to the Korean student and explain something in Korean. Absurdly smart. When he was teaching us he was taking another degree in Geology, I think a Masters. And he's only around 50 years old...

One of the times I was in a mental hospital, there was this guy named Ben. He grabbed a piece of paper and a crayon one day, and started writing. He wrote 17 different types of nuts. Then he went on to list the country of origin of EACH DIFFERENT NUT. Every single one was a different country.

There were more great people in each hospital than I have ever met on the outside. I just don't understand why they have to lock up such beautiful and intelligent people who have fallen on hard times.

Anytime my family friend speaks. He's a retired plastic surgeon and he can speak about anything in the world. He knows a significant amount of knowledge from any topic you can pull out of [thin air]. One time, we were eating dinner and he spoke about music, dance, stocks, investments, and what places to eat in New Orleans... everything had a vast amount of detail.

So. Envious.

Me and a close friend both have some form of High Functioning Autism and we sit next to each other in our High School English Class. Whenever the class reads a novel for an assignment both of us are done reading it weeks before the rest of the class. So when the teacher decides that high school seniors are incapable of reading on their own (pretty much ever day we're supposed to read) he read the book to us. so well the rest of the class exists in various stages of comatose. we just write stuff in the corner of are notebooks and show the other, these goes on until one of us realizes that even the most bored of "ordinary" students won't even bother converting 11 kilometers 372 meters and 3 centimeters into the corresponding imperial units, let alone do such things with out use of a calculator or scratch paper.

My grandfather never finished high school, but could add a full page of 4 or 5 digit numbers just by looking at it.  Couldn't divide or multiply without struggling, and algebra was just gibberish to him.  
But he had this gift of adding numbers in his head at a glance.  .

I know two chemistry professors in different countries who can do the same trick.

Advances in chemistry are published in papers, and retrieving the paper involves knowing the journal, year, and page number (with some journals you may also need volume and issue numbers, but it's usually just those three). Both these profs can remember the entire reference for any paper they recall. They'll just be like, "oh yeah I remember in Tetrahedron Letters 1995, page 4857 someone oxidized an alcohol with hypervalent iodine for the first time.

Dude on a Reddit comment yesterday worked out how long a man had done his job based on how many steps he’d done. He was only two months off.

I knew a merchandiser for a soda distributor who could glance at a display and know exactly how many packages of each flavor were needed.

No standing in front of it. No counting. No notes. Just a short walk around the store aisles, to the back room, and "24 Pepsi 12 packs, 31 Mountain Dew, etc.."

I was impressed every time.
I think it was a mixture of him being very experienced, being the person who merchandised he displays last time, and some form of neurodivergence.

The little sister of a friend of mine was one of those kids who develop language at a freakishly early age. She was younger than two, I was eating dinner at their place, and she knocked her sippy cup off her high chair table. She shrugged and said "a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.".

I can tell the square footage of any corporate meeting room within 15 seconds.

I also know how to count ceiling tiles and multiply.

I have an in-law that moved to Hong Kong and became fluent in Cantonese AND Mandarin.

I knew a guy in a bike club who had several PHDs. You'd never know unless you started asking him questions.

My classmate knew the capital city of every country!

One of my closest friends. Not a single instance, but he just seems to excel in most things he tries. He does exceedingly well in school, studied biology, chemistry, he's accomplished at math, he can play guitar, drums, bass, self taught piano, he can paint and do art pretty well, he cooks really nice looking dishes on a near daily basis, very organised, well read in the area of politics, world affairs, social stuff and history. He's also not socially inept (though I do possess a bit more natural social adeptness then him...so he claims).

I think the dude is brilliant.

There is this kid in my class. He literally got to the max number you can get on 2048 which is like 32000+.

I have a friend who is incredibly smart. She's in almost all advanced classes, was taking a senior level physics class last year (during freshman year of high school), is fluent in Latin and Japanese, and was reading books that even Shakespeare would find difficult by the end of middle school.