Dr. Deen in ECE is working on some pretty mind blowing stuff. I hate the guy but he is super smart.

It is an arbitrary question. A lot of success in research has to do with presentation and ability to make connections. It can make or break you as a researcher. There is also a large degree of luck involved at various stages of the academic career. So I wouldn't measure it by academic success.

On the flip side, as others mentioned, it's pointless to talk about who seems the smartest. In addition we only know a small subset of the professors at mac in our own experience, and there are a lot of faculty who do not regularly interact with undergraduates at all.

That said. I am confident in saying that Fraser Mustard, when he was alive, was likely one of the most intelligent professor at McMaster. While I never had the chance to meet him, everyone I know who worked with him hold him in nothing but the highest regard academically.

“I think Fraser Mustard will be remembered as the great renaissance man of Canadian intellectual life,” said David Naylor, president of the University of Toronto.

“(There’s) a massive array where Fraser Mustard’s wonderful fingerprints will live for all time,” Naylor said, calling him “an absolute giant, who has had a huge impact on this country, and a man of unflagging curiosity and great generosity of spirit.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/...od-development

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Scholes

Scroll down to Early Life & Education.

Whomever that professor was that inspired this guy, would be the answer.
Edit: It's Dr. Gregor Smith
Sir Scholes a McMaster grad, theorized the framework for the notorious Black-Scholes precedence-based hedging formulae:



Considered to be one of the most profound and controversial investment feats of the century..

rashid khan

Originally Posted by karna

rashid khan

i'm contemplating reporting this as spam

I'd have to suggest pretty much half of the psych department. Because psychology is such a young field, we have the privilege of having faculty on staff who have made (imo) tremendous contributions to the field. For example, Prof. Galef (emeritus) is one of the pioneers in modern animal behaviour research. Prof. Dukas also has various textbook references to his name, as does prof. schmidt. We have professors with articles published in scientific american, multiple degrees and harvard doctorals on their belts. We even have a professor who didn't do a masters after undergraduate, and went right ahead to his pHD.

I think the professor I most admire in terms of expertise and intelligence has to be Dr. Paul Andrews, who currently studies the evolutionary roots of mental health. I'll let you read his self-description yourself:

"I am an Assistant Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, but I have had a checkered educational past. My bachelor's degree was in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Arizona, and I received my law degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I then pursued a PhD in Biology at the University of New Mexico, after which I did postdoctoral work in evolutionary psychology (University of New Mexico) and in psychiatric and behavioural genetics (Virginia Commonwealth University)."- source

Wolfram Kahl, from CAS Department.

This guy is a genius !

on an aside note: I love when professors talk about the research they do! I miss being in first year when I had profs from all sorts of different subjects. xD

dr Bernier ? hehehe

Originally Posted by Hussain1

Wolfram Kahl, from CAS Department.

This guy is a genius !

Already mentioned him.

Oh I forgot Teal Mcateer in Degroote. Her OB course (which is pretty much psych) was ridiculously good.

Originally Posted by tyrant

I think the place to start is to see how many papers they've published.

just cause someone sounds smart doesn't mean anything, they could have a little con artist in them....

Number of papers has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with the area of research (and the amount of funding they can get, which is vastly different in different areas of research), how hardworking their grad students are, and LUCK. I'd judge intelligence by listening to someone talk about something they know a lot about, long before I'd judge based on number of papers published. Sure, publishing a lot is impressive, but you have to look at the quality of it and know that the prof is just one relatively small part of the equation...luck is probably the biggest component.

apples and oranges. unless you want to give them all a standardized test and compare cross-subject/field/expertise, then its way too arbitrary of a question to answer. especially since most of us have only dealt with a handful of profs, id imagine that no one here can say a name without me or anyone else being skeptical. silly question to ask, i think

Dr. Rodde! in the dept. of philosophy

O'Donnell and Nurse. Both very smart guys... and Nurse is so nice, he thinks we are all super smart too... lol