The best scientists probably won't be recognized during their lifetimes. The scientists you do recognize while they're alive, are probably not the best at "science".
Hard disagree, unless what you mean by recognition is popular fame of the sort Stephen Hawking enjoys. Within their fields, scientists are typically recognized well before they die. Feynman was extremely well known to physicists, but he’s still basically unknown compared to Neil Degrasse Tyson. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon were renowned. Terence Tao, Ed Witten and Andrew Wiles are probably in the top percentile of mathematicians in the world, and they’re heaped with awards despite still being alive. But ask random passerby on the street about any of these people and you’ll get a vague guess at best.
Frankly, if anything I feel Einstein’s legacy has enjoyed outsized fame compared to his actual contributions. I think his work was the best of the field in the 20th century, but I’m not sure it’s realistically possible to become as recognized in modern science.
This brings up an important point. People are good at different tasks.
Some people are exceptional with gleaning and regurgitating information from texts and lectures. This is what we mostly label as "smart" today.
Others can be great at different things, such as any of the vast sets of social skills, critical thinking, maths, strategy, etc.
The problem is that while intelligence in one skill is correlated with intelligence in another, it is not necessarily the case.
We probably all have met engineers who openly admit they're not the greatest writers. Another example was one I learned from my interest in chess. Bobby Fischer was one of the greatest at the game, but notoriously struggled with memorizing opening game lines and theory. I am sure many of us here have also met engineers and academics with a lot of knowledge in their field, but whom also hold missconceptions, or easily come to factually erroneous conclusions on things which they have not studies.
When I read the story, I was a bit incredulous at the author's words that "IQ is real and it does matter," not because it's such an obvious over-simplification.
However, universities will be reluctant to disavow their beliefs in the mystical IQ--an idea which rests in the scholarly literature as an estimation of G, general intelligence--as this is a set of institutions which benefits from their faith not just that it is something which can be measured on a test, but that they do accurately measure it.
They're running in circles with this "medium brilliance" because they're out of ideas about why their faith's predictions failed. Turns out those who score the best on IQ tests are those who are the best at scoring well on IQ tests--not the same set of skills needed to be the best scientists.
Here is one such interview: https://youtu.be/7EuxVOgrEig
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#Opening_theory
> "He employs a limited range of openings. Of course, this is not a sign of Fischer's limited creativity, since he compensates for this by a very profound and sound knowledge of the variations he favours [sic]." Plisetsky & Voronkov 2005, p. 270.
> Fischer was renowned for his opening preparation and made numerous contributions to chess opening theory
He promoted (not invented) Fischerrandom / Chess960 because he felt that memorizing ever-long opening sequences was boring and ruined the game, and that would be soon dominated by computers with their far-superior memory.
Fischer was, despite being, at one point, the greatest chess player in the world, and on people's all-time greatest lists, predictable in his use of openings, as you know since this is widely documented and you're well-read on him. Your quote even admits this.
So I'm not sure what you are exactly disagreeing with that I said. Maybe the source of disagreement is that I unintentionally gave the impression that he has a bad memory, or a bad opening game. As he was one of the greatest chess players, this was clearly not true. Rather, the idea was that he had a notable disdain and discouragement from memorizing learning opening game theory. He was never able to master a very large number of openings... This was a notable feature of him as a player.
Perhaps he could have, but that would be speculation. I think he just wasn't as good at it as the other top players.