[toyg]

Alex Ferguson might have been a good football manager, but he wasn't a genius - and I say that as a Man United supporter. He didn't advance football in any significant way, and even towards the end of his career he was somewhat naive from a tactical perspective.

He was just a good man-manager in what is a sea of managerial mediocrity - football management is largely restricted to ex-pro-footballers who can't do anything else. Rinus Michels was a genius, Arrigo Sacchi was a genius - they actually advanced the sport.

[FabHK]

On a similar note, Page and Brin were obviously smart and driven and all, but applying linear algebra to the search problem was arguably one of the things that was "in the air". It is hard to judge, because what seems obvious ex post was (obviously) not obvious ex ante. But, again, eigenvalue decomposition/SVD (and linear algebra more generally) - you throw it at the Netflix problem, you throw it at image compression, you throw it at anything really, something's gonna stick.

It's an interesting counterfactual: without Page, when would Page Rank have come around? The idea that the stationary distribution of a Markov Chain (under certain conditions) is given by the eigenvector to the (largest) eigenvalue 1 is certainly decades old, if not a century.

[jll29]

Yes, and also don't forget that Rajeev Motwani's (Ph.D. supervisor and FFF investor) research field was randomized algorithms. So thinking about random walks in his group was a bread and butter thing, probably, not something that required genius. Rajeev is co-author to several seminal paper on the search engine and worked intensively with Google and joined their board. According to Prabhakar Raghavan, Sergey Brin acknowledged in a BBC Radio interview in 2009 that Google might not have been possible without Rajeev. (Tragically, he passed away in 2009 by falling into his own pool with alcohol in his blood, and he could not swim.)

[whatshisface]

You start to loose correlation with IQ really, really quickly as you move away from feats of solving established math problems to football management and entrepreneurship. Solving established math problems is more like taking an IQ test than any other activity that I can think of.