In 1979 Omni Magazine interviewed Richard Feynman and titled the article “The Smartest Man In The World”. This used to be a link to that interview at Omni’s WWW site until they decided to shut that website down and refer all links to the website of another magazine.
We regret that we cannot reprint the interview here, but it is available in the book “The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out”, published in 1999 by Perseus Books.
When Richard Feynman’s mother Lucille heard that her son, Richard, had been designated the Smartest Man In The World by a magazine, her response was “Our Richie? The world’s smartest man? God helps us!“.
Source: http://www.feynman.com/stories/the-smartest-man-in-the-world/