Question: Who would you say is the greatest scientist in the history of scientists?

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 15 Nov 2017:

I wouldn’t say that there is a single greatest scientist better than anyone else. I would say that there are some scientists that managed to spot something extremely obvious yet unnoticed and they managed to explain it in a simple and function way. That said, everyone has his own preferences and role models. My favourite scientists are Alan Turing, Charles Darwin and John Nash and they influenced me a lot among the classics. On top of inventing computer science, Turing asked some questions on AI and intelligence still unanswered and actual today. Nash defined formally how two selfish people can came to an agreement and his work had implications on a branch of AI (called computational game theory). He also inspired to study the opposite problem: how you force two selfish people to stick to fair an equal rules (this is called Mechanism Design and the inventors of this theory got the Nobel prize some years ago), this theory ended up in my bachelor thesis and aided me in taking my future career decisions. Darwin’s studies on the theory of evolution paved the way for one of my scientific results that demonstrate that the grasping skills of robot hands might be limited because the opposing thumb is not correctly represented and it is not just a hand control problem. I found a confirmation of this by studying the findings of evolutionary biologists which branched off his original ideas. If you think that all those three people and their ideas were very bullied in their last years this adds up to my respect for them.