Source: TW
Is India producing enough out-of-the-chart brilliant people ? Given our population and size (nearly 1/5th of humanity), we should be producing a few intellects of the level of Euler, Gauss, Newton, Ramanujan every generation
Receeding edge
If we are talking of level of Euler etc that doesn’t happen even in the US/Germany with apparently higher mean IQ & resources than India. A part of it is the expanding frontier of science. The edge of science today is at a large radius & it may not be easy to recognize anything at that edge without a lot of effort.
For example, people with modest mathematical capacity & some effort can at least understand some of the discoveries of Gauss or Ramanujan to get a feel for why they were genii.(4) Closer to our times 2 Jewish intellectual are mentioned as being at that level: Witten, a mathematical physicist & Grothendieck the mathematician. Most commoners cannot grasp the rarified heights at which they operate.
With Kepler or Newton we get an immediate feel for palpable problems like planetary motion. With Witten we don’t even know if all his rarified mathematics describes a real physics in the first place. It may not be known for a long time.
Gatekeeping
Another major issue characteristic of Euro-American scientific culture is gate-keeping, with the gatekeeper themselves being rather mediocre. Even if you are a genius, you are not going to be able to publish your work in the formal venues for the gatekeepers operate by name & place recognition.(4) It happened to Ramanujan too – the first people he contacted ignore him but he was luck that Hardy & Littlewood saw him for what he was.
Lab management
There is also the whole apparatus for getting ahead in science which involves politics (not all geniuses are good at that). That filter usually selects for good managers of large groups rather than genii. A look at the Medicine & Physiology & some Chemistry Nobel prizes in the past 20 yrs shows hardly any genii but high energy lab managers operating in relatively virgin territory.
Conclusion
Thus, I’d say across cultures, the scope for the impact of a true genius has probably considerably lessened in the past 40-50 years. If one is born with such smarts there might be other avenues beyond academia.