Who is the smartest person you have ever met?

I have been very fortunate in my life to have been exposed to a great many very intelligent people (no Borepatch, you are not on the list).  I am neither smart, nor humble, but for some reason I take great joy in coming across people who are on another level than I am intellectually.  Maybe it is akin to why I like to play tennis, pool, golf, etc. against someone who is a little better than me: their presence raises my own game.  I am often in a sense of awe over how someone could even get their minds around a problem so they could solve it.  Take, for example, Eratosthenes.  While living in Egypt about 200 BC, he calculated the circumference of the Earth to within about 2% accuracy of what we know it to be today.  For those of you that are counting, that would be 1700 years before Columbus.  He lived almost exactly on the equator.  When he stuck a stick straight into the ground using a simple plumb at noon on the equinox, he saw that it created no shadow.  He then paid someone to walk and count the number of paces from his town to Alexandria and thus measured the distance between the two.  On the next equinox, he repeated the plumbed stick in the ground in the other city and measured the small shadow that was cast because Alexandria was north of the equator.  Using Pythagoras's therom, he calculated the angles and then the distance from the surface to the center of the world.  It was simple calculation from the radius to the circumference, so he knew how far around the Earth was.  Every time I think of Eratosthenes I marvel, not just at his calculations, but even more at how the heck he thought to ask the question.

Along those lines, I once had the pleasure of meeting Richard Davisson, a truly world renowned physicist.  He had a summer home in Brooklin, Maine, a few towns down the coast from my place.  Since my parents were academicians, I often came in contact with their friends and acquaintances, one of whom was Professor Davisson.  He was the son and nephew of Nobel laureates.  Professor Davisson's storied career included working on the Manhattan Project and inventing the system that detected sub-atomic particles.  That's right, CERN owes its existence to him.  I could go on and on, but instead I will cut to my favorite Professor Daivsson quote:

"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool."

Differential temperatures in Hell prove no physicists have ever been condemned to eternal damnation...   How the heck did he think to even ask the question?