William James Sidis, Marilyn vos Savant, and Leonardo da Vinci have some of the highest IQs in history — but are they really the world's smartest people?
Over the years, intelligence quotient tests, or IQ tests, have been seen as a way to quantify a person’s brainpower. In general terms, the higher a person’s IQ, the more intelligent they are. Naturally, this has sparked conversations about who has the highest IQ in the world — and whether that individual should be considered the smartest person in the world.
Famed physicist Albert Einstein’s name often comes up in conversations like these. He had an estimated IQ of 160, but that is not the highest IQ ever recorded. In fact, there are several child prodigies who have scored higher than Einstein. And public figures like Marilyn vos Savant and Christopher Langan have also been hailed as the smartest people in the world.
Albert Einstein
Einstein also played an indirect role in the United States' development of nuclear weapons during World War II, as he warned President Franklin Roosevelt that the Nazis had been conducting similar research. However, Einstein later denounced the use of nuclear weapons.
He died on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76, and although his IQ was never officially tested while he was alive, many historians have estimated that it may have been around 160. Public Domain
Marilyn vos Savant
Her intelligence was cited by two tests, the Stanford-Binet Test and the Mega Test, but just a few years after Savant was given the award, Guinness retired it. By that point, debates about IQ testing had made many people believe that the tests were too unreliable to determine a single person who could hold the record.
Still, Savant remains famous for her high score and she's best known for her “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine, where she answers a wide variety of reader-submitted questions.Twitter
Ainan Celeste Cawley
Richard "Rick" Rosner
Why would someone do such a thing? According to Rosner, he wanted to perfect his high school experience. Rosner also wanted "one of those desk-chair combinations" to sit at while he pondered his "theory of everything." He eventually learned that he had an IQ of 192.
After graduating high school for the final time, Rosner went on to write quiz shows for MTV and was later hired as a writer and producer for Jimmy Kimmel. Aside from finding success in the television industry, Rosner has also claimed to have worked a number of other jobs throughout the years, including a bouncer, a nude model, and a roller-skating waiter.Twitter
Christopher Hirata
Marie Curie
Christopher Langan
Despite taking a nap during the SAT, Langan earned a perfect score on the exam and earned a full scholarship to Reed College. But when his mother failed to send over important forms securing his scholarship, he dropped out. Still, Langan, whose IQ has been estimated to be between 195 and 210, made a name for himself as "the smartest man in the world" while working odd jobs, such as a construction worker, a fitness trainer, and a bouncer.
Unfortunately, Langan eventually tarnished his own legacy by subscribing to several conspiracy theories as a 9/11 truther and a believer in the white replacement theory. Facebook
Edith Stern
Born in 1952, Edith Stern was the child of Aaron and Bella Stern, who met while living in a ghetto in Warsaw. Aaron Stern, a scholar, pushed his daughter into academics almost immediately after she was born. By age two, Edith Stern had mastered the alphabet, and by age three, she knew how to play chess. She enrolled in college at 12 years old, and she was teaching mathematics at a college level by age 15.
Edith Stern eventually went on to become the Vice President for Research and Development at IBM. She also made a name for herself as a talented inventor and holds over 100 patents.Twitter
Garry Kasparov
Francis Galton
But while Galton was an esteemed explorer and anthropologist who created the first weather map, he was also a proponent of horrific fields of study like eugenics and scientific racism, which he supported until his death in 1911.Public Domain
Isaac Newton
William James Sidis
By the time he was just 18 months old, he could read The New York Times. When Sidis was six, he could speak multiple languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, and Turkish. At one point, he even invented a brand-new language of his own. Sidis began his education at Harvard at age 11 and graduated at just 16. Perhaps most astounding, his IQ was estimated to be between 250 and 300.
But as an adult, he had no interest in changing the world or staying in the limelight. Instead, he lived much of his life in seclusion, taking on menial jobs and later dying of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 46 — penniless and alone.Wikimedia Commons
Nathan Leopold
Leopold teamed up with another intelligent young man, Richard Loeb, to brutally murder a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks — just to commit the "perfect crime." Leopold and Loeb were convinced that their high intellect and privilege would allow them to get away with killing Franks. But their disturbing plan didn't work, and both Leopold and Loeb were soon arrested and sentenced to life in prison.
Loeb was ultimately killed in prison by another inmate, but Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958 and relocated to Puerto Rico, where he lived out the rest of his days in relative peace until his death from a heart attack in 1971.Wikimedia Commons
Judit Polgár
Kim Ung-yong
Hypatia
Leonardo da Vinci
Marnen Laibow-Koser
Michael Grost
Michael Kearney
Nikola Tesla
Philip Emeagwali
Sho Yano
Stephen Hawking
Terence Tao
Voltaire
Johann Goethe
Of course, IQ tests do have limitations and many have questioned whether or not they should be used as a determination of a person's intellect. There is also a dark history behind some IQ tests, as they've been used in the past to discriminate against people belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups.
What's more, both the reliability and efficacy of IQ tests have frequently been called into question. Some experts have suggested that they may be less an indicator of intelligence and more an indicator of a person's motivational level, quality of schooling, health status, and other variables.
That said, it's fascinating to read the true stories behind the people with the highest IQs in the world. Learn about these individuals in the photo gallery above, then read more about the complicated history of IQ testing below.
The Creation Of The First IQ Test
In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, a great deal of interest was stirring in the scientific community regarding research on intelligence. Early works on the subject were published by Sir Francis Galton, the founder of differential psychology, who believed that intelligence was hereditary and could be determined by observing how a person performed sensorimotor tasks.
According to Verywell Mind, these tasks involve the human brain receiving a message, and then producing a response (like slowing down after you see someone in front of you slowing down). Galton, an English polymath, often used statistics while explaining how to measure a person's intelligence.
Public DomainAlfred Binet, the French psychologist who developed the first IQ test, known as the Binet-Simon Scale.
Around the turn of the century, a French lawyer-turned-psychologist by the name of Alfred Binet became fascinated by Galton's work. He too began research into the development of tests to measure intelligence, which were put to wide-scale use in 1904 when the French government enlisted Binet's help to try and determine which children would struggle the most in school.
Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon then created a test comprised of a series of questions focused on skills such as attention and problem-solving — not necessarily skills that were taught in classrooms, but skills that could possibly affect a child's ability to learn. This 30-question test became known as the Binet-Simon Scale, the first officially recognized IQ test.
The Evolution Of Testing Intelligence
Over time, the Binet-Simon Scale was improved upon — first by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman, who standardized the test and used two scales of measurement in his revision, rather than one, to provide more accurate results. He also translated the test into English in 1916.
A year later, psychologist Robert Yerkes developed two IQ tests for the U.S. Army, the Alpha and Beta tests. The Alpha test was a written exam, while the Beta test was made up of pictures for recruits who couldn't read or who weren't fluent in English. Both tests were designed to help the Army determine which recruits might be good fits for specific roles in the military.
Unfortunately, IQ tests like these were also used to screen immigrants entering the United States, which led government officials to impose discriminatory restrictions on groups who supposedly had "inferior" IQs.
Public DomainPsychologist David Wechsler, who published a new intelligence test in 1955 called the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.
Then, in 1955, American psychologist David Wechsler created a new intelligence test known as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Wechsler strongly believed that intelligence should be measured by comparing the scores of test takers within the same age group.
Several revisions were made to Wechsler's system, eventually evolving into the WAIS-IV, which is the modern standard for intelligence testing. Using this standard, the average score is fixed at 100, with two-thirds of test takers landing somewhere in the normal range of between 85 and 115.
Today, when we look at candidates for the highest IQ ever recorded, this is generally the scale that we're using (or an estimate that's based on this scale). In theory, the higher a person's score, the more intelligent they are — though this has also been called into question over the years.
Who Has The Highest IQ In The World?
Even with the standardization of IQ tests and the numerous revisions made to them over time, it's still not quite so simple to identify the highest IQ ever. There are, of course, people whose scores extend upwards into the high 100s and even into the 200s, but shockingly, some of the world's smartest people have much lower scores than you might expect.
Albert Einstein, for example, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds in all of history, yet his IQ was only estimated to be around 160 — still well above the average, but not a forerunner for the highest IQ in the world. And Stephen Hawking's IQ has been estimated to be the same number.
You'd be hard pressed to find anyone arguing that Einstein and Hawking were unintelligent, of course, but from a purely statistical viewpoint, their estimated scores pale in comparison to the scores of William James Sidis and Marilyn vos Savant. Sidis was a child prodigy with an estimated IQ of anywhere between 250 and 300; Savant's IQ has been recorded as 228.
Public DomainAlbert Einstein's IQ was never officially tested, but some sources have estimated his IQ to be around 160.
But IQ tests are not a perfect measure of intelligence. Critics have often called them "fundamentally flawed," and the discussion also raises the question of what, exactly, it means to be one of the world's smartest people.
Take Christopher Langan, for example. Langan's IQ falls somewhere between 195 and 210, leading some to call him the "smartest man in the world." However, Langan also happens to be a 9/11 truther and a believer in the white replacement theory who, in 2018, wrote a Facebook obituary for Koko the gorilla, then asserted that Western countries should admit gorillas as immigrants instead of Somalis, claiming that gorillas are more intelligent.
Because of this, some have called him "Alex Jones with a thesaurus."
Langan is an unusual example, but one that highlights the flaws of using IQ tests as a determiner of the smartest people in the world.
The "Fundamentally Flawed" Nature Of IQ Tests
As a report from The Independent explains, a 2012 study found that IQ tests fail to accurately represent the complex nature of human intellect.
"The results disprove once and for all the idea that a single measure of intelligence, such as IQ, is enough to capture all of the differences in cognitive ability that we see between people," said Roger Highfield, the director of external affairs at the Science Museum in London.
Researchers analyzed a sample of 46,000 individuals from around the world who filled out an online survey where they were asked to complete 12 mental tests to measure different aspects of their cognitive ability.
In the end, they determined that no single measure of intelligence could represent the variations seen among the three distinct components of cognitive ability: short-term memory, a verbal component, and reasoning.
"It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests," Highfield said. "For a century or more many people have thought that we can distinguish between people, or indeed populations, based on the idea of general intelligence which is often talked about in terms of a single number: IQ. We have shown here that's just wrong."
Does this mean IQ tests are completely useless? Not necessarily. But they shouldn't be used alone to determine the smartest people in the world.
After reading about some of the people with the highest IQs in the world, learn about these 15 interesting people that history forgot. Or, check out these photos of history's biggest musicians just before their rise to stardom.
