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I'll argue that it's not the case that there's a selected few dozen geniuses in the world that just happen to be much smarter than the rest.
There's an awful lot smart mathematicians/physicists/etc. people and any price that awards a handful of people per year is necessarily just a cutout. It's very often political (and gender preference is just one aspect of this) and also highly preferences extroverted people or people who like the academia game and make connections and lead other people and all that.
Moreover, thousands of people have been put on rather dead projects (String Theory niche geometry comes to mind, and that's not a dab at String Theory but just historical retrospective, looking at what came out of the research starting in the 90's). You can be assured that there were hundreds/thousands of "geniuses" working on unfortunate topics and also hundreds/thousands of "geniuses" who are just spergs, socially retarded smart people, or people made babies too soon. Awards are a show for a few selected topics. It's dubious what it says about them, as compared to the no-names that pave the way beside them.
