You ever heard of this guy Chris Langan? He's like really smart.
What do you make of this guy's story? His theories? And anything else?
Quote:
Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1952) is an American autodidact whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210.[1] Billed by some media sources as "the smartest man in America",[2] he rose to prominence in 1999 while working as a bouncer on Long Island. Langan has developed his own "theory of the relationship between mind and reality" which he calls the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)".
Langan was born in San Francisco and spent most of his early life in Montana. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy shipping executive but was cut off from her family; his father died or disappeared before he was born.[5] He began talking at six months, taught himself to read before he was four, and was repeatedly skipped ahead in school.[6] But he grew up in poverty and says he was beaten by his stepfather from when he was almost six to when he was about fourteen.[7] By then Langan had begun weight training, and forcibly ended the abuse, throwing his stepfather out of the house and telling him never to return.[8]
Langan says he spent the last years of high school mostly in independent study, teaching himself "advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all that".[9] His brother recalls that "when Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he would draw things just as a joke, and it would be like a photograph. When he was fifteen, he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on a guitar."[10] After earning a perfect score on the SAT[7] Langan attended Reed College and later Montana State University, but faced with finance and transportation problems, and believing that he "could literally teach [his professors] more than they could teach [him]", dropped out.[9]
He took a string of labor-intensive jobs, and by his mid-40s had been a construction worker, cowboy, forest service firefighter, farmhand, and for over twenty years, a bouncer on Long Island. He says he developed a "double-life strategy", on one side a regular guy, doing his job and exchanging pleasantries, and on the other side coming home to perform equations in his head, working in isolation on his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.[9]
Wider attention came in 1999, when Esquire magazine published a profile of Langan and other members of the high-IQ community.[9] Billing Langan as "the smartest man in America", the article's account of the weight-lifting bouncer and his CTMU "Theory of Everything" sparked a flurry of media interest. Board-certified neuropsychologist Dr. Robert Novelly tested Langan's IQ for 20/20, which reported that Langan broke the ceiling of the test. Novelly was said to be astounded, saying: "Chris is the highest individual that I have ever measured in 25 years of doing this."[7]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ak5Lr3qkW0&feature=related[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mfbUhs2PVY&feature=related[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0gjyXG5O0&feature=related[/youtube]
01 Dec 2009, 6:14 pm
