World’s top 20 in 2010

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks on during a news conference at Facebook headquarters on October 6, 2010 in Palo Alto, California.

What you need to know:

  • Amid all the tragic, comic and inspirational stories of last year, a small group of talented and smart people were tinkering with the very fundamentals of how we live — and some were changing the way we think about life itself.
  • Some are names you know. Some are names that remain obscure from the zeitgeist. But in sum, their innovations in 2010 will define the technological, scientific and social milieu of the decade

The past 12 months were defined by recovery. Unemployment and foreclosures remain high, yet the world economy is tentatively stable. The Gulf of Mexico is still cleaning up after the disastrous BP oil spill, Haitians fought tragedy after tragedy after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated the island nation, and a group of 33 Chilean miners survived for 69 days more than a mile underground in a space the size of a Manhattan apartment.

Conan O’Brien bounced back on TBS after being booted from NBC, quarterback Michael Vick regained a sliver of good grace with his MVP-caliber play for the Philadelphia Eagles, and Tiger Woods returned to the links, albeit with mixed results.

Amid all the tragic, comic and inspirational stories of 2010, a small group of talented and smart people were tinkering with the very fundamentals of how we live — and some were changing the way we think about life itself.

Some are names you know. Some are names that remain obscure from the zeitgeist. But in sum, their innovations in 2010 will define the technological, scientific and social milieu of the decade. The very idea of what constitutes “smart” is difficult to define.

We did our best by focusing on three factors:

  • Flashes of brilliance that occurred or came to a head in 2010
  • Intelligence in action
  • Overall smarts

The Daily Beast surveyed key staffers and contributors to determine an initial list, which was then presented to a group of more than 20 geniuses — recent winners of coveted MacArthur grants, awarded on the basis of pure brilliance.

This group cut the list down to 20 and ranked these best of the best, creating our final list of the 20 Smartest People of 2010. While no such exercise can be truly exhaustive, it is undeniable that everyone on this list, from the big-name to the no-name, has left an indelible footprint on intellectual and popular culture.

1. JON STEWART

Opinionated, funny and, according to our panel, the smartest person of 2010. Jon Stewart, conventional wisdom went, peaked after Barack Obama was elected (his comic foil had left office). Yet two years later, the brain behind The Daily Show remains speedier and more biting than the media monoliths and political establishment he regularly skewers. Last year, Stewart went further. He turned his logic-rooted, hypocrisy-bashing comedy into action, with his Stephen Colbert co-hosted Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which drew roughly 200,000 people to Washington’s National Mall in October.

2. BILL AND MELINDA GATES

Bill and Melinda Gates are becoming better known for philanthropy than software, as evidenced by this year’s work with Warren Buffett on the revolutionary Giving Pledge, which asked fellow billionaires to put their money where their mouths are by promising to give away at least half their wealth to charity. Signatories include New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge-fund magnate T Boone Pickens and Ted Turner. Some estimate say The Giving Pledge will amount to $150 billion in future philanthropy — a smart sum by any measure.

3. STEVE JOBS

Coming off a liver transplant in 2009, Steve Jobs led Apple to one of the most remarkable years in tech history, with most of the moves directly attributable to the vision of the company’s founder. The company introduced the game-changing and highly successful iPad as well as the flawed but also successful iPhone 4; Apple TV sold 1 million units in its first three months; and Apple finally overtook longtime rival Microsoft in market capitalisation. The Beatles’ catalog, at last, joined iTunes.

4. MARK ZUCKERBERG

The founder of social-networking site Facebook – and subject of the movie The Social Network – saw his brainchild reach 500 million users in July, making it the most ubiquitous way to interact and reconnect online.
“I usually don’t like things that are too much about me,” he told Time, which named him its “Person of the Year.”
Well, Zuck, get used to the attention. When you’re smart enough to fundamentally change the way people communicate, odds are there’ll be journalists nipping at your heels for, say, the rest of your life.

5. J. CRAIG VENTER

For John Craig Venter, 2010 was officially the year of life – or at least the year that we reconsidered what it means to be alive. Venter and his research institute created the first living organism with a synthetic genome, at a cost of $40 million and 15 years.
“If you look over the last few years, at what they’ve been able to produce, it’s definitely impressive,” MIT biology professor Ron Weiss said. “Being able to create genomes of this scale? That’s impressive.”
Venter’s work, many years down the road, could lead to cheaper medicine, biofuels and, of course, new insights on the basic building blocks of life.

6. JULIAN ASSANGE

Hate him or love him, terrorist or journalist, Julian Assange has created the most successful mechanism for enhancing transparency. Whether the world is a better place is an open question, but the brilliance and impact are undeniable. Assange firmly established himself as a polarising figure in the United States in 2010 with WikiLeaks’ release of classified diplomatic cables and video of a botched 2007 Baghdad airstrike during which Reuters reporters were fired on by US military personnel. As a sort of real-life 007 figure, it makes sense that Assange keeps WikiLeaks’ servers in a former Cold War bunker 100 feet below the streets of Stockholm, according to recent reports.

7. PERRY CHEN, YANCEY STRICKLER, CHARLES ADLER

Three of the smartest people of 2010, according to our panel, get credit for revolutionising how smaller projects get funded. Pals Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler founded Kickstarter in April 2009 after raising $300,000 in seed money from family and friends. Based out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the startup pioneered an online threshold pledge system, to spur everything from indie films to rock-band tours to inventions. The crowd-funding site allows project managers to select a fundraising target minimum, a deadline to meet that figure, and a list of rewards that backers will receive. If the minimum is not gathered by the deadline, no funds are collected, but if the target is met, the project moves forward, and Kickstarter receives a 5 per cent cut of the funds raised.

8. FELISA WOLFE-SIMON

There are a few truths about life, including death, taxes and that phosphorus is a key component of DNA and RNA. Or so everyone thought until Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues discovered a bacterium in the waters of Mono Lake in northeastern California that is able to use arsenic in place of phosphorus.
“Our findings are a reminder that life-as-we-know-it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” Wolfe-Simon said.

9. MICHELLE RHEE

Oprah Winfrey has called her a “warrior woman.” After leading Washington, DC schools using an aggressive approach of firing incompetent administrators and focusing on better test performance per dollar spent, Rhee last year founded Studentsfirst.org. Rhee’s detractors say her combative businesslike approach is a poor fit for public education, but criticisms have failed to gain traction among education bigwigs. “Michelle Rhee is back – bolder and even more committed and determined than ever. If education is the civil-rights issue of our time, then we must forge a new and ever more vibrant movement to march to the beat of this new drum,” said Gloria Romero, a former California legislator.

10. AARON SORKIN

“You can’t handle the truth!” screamed Jack Nicholson in the 1992 film A Few Good Men. And with that classic movie line, playwright-cum-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s genius was established. Since then, Sorkin’s become known for memorable speeches and lightning-fast dialogue rife with witty repartee. In 2010, he delivered The Social Network, adapting Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires about Mark Zuckerberg’s founding Facebook. Despite the criticisms that it’s misogynistic and plays loose with the facts, the film has received universal praise from critics, with Sorkin’s Rashomon-style screenplay receiving much of the credit.

11. SEBASTIAN THRUN

Ever looked over while stopped at a red light and seen a car with no driver? Someday, if Sebastian Thrun and Google have their way, that surreal vision might become reality. In 2010, Thrun revealed the secret project: As of October of lat year, his robot cars had driven more than 140,000 miles without a driver (sort of – there’s always someone in the front seat ready to take over). Thrun’s first driverless effort, a Volkswagen Toureg named Stanley, won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge in the Mojave Desert.
“Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense,” Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt said at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”
Thrun is also one of the brains behind Google’s Street View, now available on all seven continents.

12. SHERI FINK

An accomplished medical journalist with a PhD and MD from Stanford, Sheri Fink, a senior fellow with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a staff reporter at ProPublica, won a Pulitzer Prize for her in-depth account of the heartbreaking, life-or-death decisions a New Orleans hospital faced when its power was cut off by Hurricane Katrina’s floods. More important, her work influenced new national guidelines on how to deal with major medical shortages in a disaster situation. Her other work has delved deeply into the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, as well as delivering aid in combat zones and reporting on war-torn Bosnia.

13. ELON MUSK

Although Jon Favreau based his Tony Stark character in the Iron Man films on him, Elon Musk’s interests lie far from the realm of military defense. After co-founding PayPal, and then selling it to eBay, Musk concentrated his focus on more physically rooted endeavors, founding the company Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002, whose aim is to manufacture space exploration vehicles more efficiently. Late in 2009, Musk’s SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth’s orbit, and he’s working on delivering both astronauts and private citizens into Earth’s orbit and beyond. Back on Earth, Musk runs Tesla Motors, a company that specialises in selling electric cars. Tesla unveiled the Model S – an all-electric, seven-person family sedan – in March 2009 and will start shipping them to customers in 2012. In 2010, he was the youngest recipient of the Automotive Executive of the Year Innovator Award.

14. KANYE WEST

What do you do when the entire public, including George W Bush, thinks you’re a vainglorious, Taylor Swift-hating jerk? Well, if you’re boisterous, loose-lipped rapper Kanye West, you exile yourself to Hawaii, spend months in the recording studio – often sleeping there – initiate an ingenious publicity campaign for your upcoming album by not only featuring your first single, Power, in promos for The Social Network and creating a 35-minute, Thriller-esque short film for the album, but also releasing a track on your website each week through the free music program G.O.O.D. Fridays – and ultimately emerge with a rap album for the ages. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is West’s Divine Comedy – an allegorical journey through the dark corners of West’s twisted psyche that numerous critics, including Rolling Stone, named the best album of the year.

15. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Though his staggeringly prolific career has spanned four decades, including stints as a columnist at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and Slate, the outspoken polemicist reached an intellectual peak last year in the face of tremendous adversity. His tome, Hitch 22: A Memoir, was released in June to near universal praise. Then, on the day his book became a best seller, Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. His candid, heartfelt account of his battle with the disease was a thing of earnest beauty, and not even chemo could hamper his prodigious output. He found the time to appear on numerous talk shows and even square off in a sold-out public debate against former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on whether “religion is a force for good in the world.”

16. PATTI SMITH

The iconic, androgynous rock-poet chanteuse first made a name for herself during the punk-rock movement in 1970s New York City. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member’s debut album, 1975’s Horses, influenced future artistes such as R.E.M. and The Smiths, and her most famous song, Because the Night, was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. In addition to her musical achievements, Patti Smith has always been a fixture in the grungy, Lower East Side art scene – painting, sculpting and performing poetry readings. But 2010 was truly her year. She opened an art exhibition, “Objects of Life,” at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, and her memoir, Just Kids, a lyrical tale detailing her romance and friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, received the National Book Award for nonfiction.

17. MARINA ABRAMOVIC

The self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic’s work explores the complicated relationship between performer and audience, and stretches the limits of the human body – and imagination. She began her career in the 1970s with several shocking exhibitions, the most notorious of which, 1974’s “Rhythm 0,” saw Abramovic place 72 objects on a table in front of her – including scissors, a whip and a gun with a single bullet – and, for six hours, the public could use the objects any way they chose on her, while the artist remained passive (one man held the loaded gun to her neck). However, her most popular performance occurred from March 14 to May 31, 2010, at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. “The Artist Is Present” consisted of Abramovic sitting silently in a chair in the museum’s atrium, while visitors took turns sitting opposite her in a staring contest of sorts. She sat for six days a week during museum hours without a break, resulting in an epic 736-hour and 30-minute static work of performance art.

18. KUDO TSUNODA

In a year full of communication and transportation innovation, Kudo Tsunoda merged both with the release of the Microsoft Kinect, his brainchild. The Kinect takes the Wii to its logical conclusion: totally hands-free gaming. It’s no surprise that Tsunoda is the mastermind behind a full-body motion sensor gaming system, considering that until 2007 he worked for Electronic Arts developing sports and fighting games, among others.

19. JONATHAN FRANZEN

A tad arrogant and slightly crazy, Jonathan Franzen isn’t the most affable character, but the man’s genius is undeniable. After earning a National Book Award for his 2001 novel The Corrections, Franzen became an immediate sensation in the literary world and the book became one of the best-selling novels of the decade. But praise for the Midwestern author reached new heights when he released his follow-up novel, Freedom, last year. Freedom landed on virtually every critic’s top 10 list of the year, with The New York Times calling it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Franzen was the first author to grace the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000, above the headline: “Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist.”

20. DENNIS CROWLEY, NAVEEN SELVADURAI

Where are you? In 2010, Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and their Web and mobile networking tool Foursquare made it so that social butterflies never have to ask that question again. Foursquare gained 5 million total users and 25,000 new users daily in more than 95 cities, with more than $20 million in funding secured. The potential for businesses to use Foursquare also became clear in the past year.
“That’s people talking about us, coming back for second or third visits, getting excited about what we’re doing,” Chris Dilla, owner of Bocktown Bar and Grill near Pittsburgh, said.

(Research and reporting by Clark Merrefield, Marlow Stern and Lauren Streib. Distributed by the New York Times Syndicate)