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My measuring stick might be a little different than most, because when I think of Genius, I have the images of someone who not so much thought stuff up and conducted experiments, or toyed with mathematics, but someone who went against the ardent mind of the day (or later: Darwin), and came up with something so revolutionary, it changed the way the average person looked at the world. The key for me is that it must have changed the rock solid mindset of the day, or made the impossible tangible.
So applying that as my standard, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein were four greats which immediately come to mind. I might also need to consider Buddha a Genius (the Guru, which means the 'destroyer of darkness', ie. the darkness within ones own mind). And what about Magellan, didn't he drastically change the way we view the world?
Even though I greatly admire Riemann, I cannot include him...nor Tesla, Planck, Dirac or Bohr for that matter.
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