An American William James Sidis, who died in 1944, had a record IQ: from 250 to 300. However, an expert in 40 languages and the youngest Harvard student (entered there at the age of 11) did not make any contribution to science. All his life he worked as a modest office worker. RIA Novosti understands what IQ can tell about a person's mental abilities and what are the results of this test among recognized geniuses.
Define intelligence
The first IQ test was invented in 1912 by the German psychologist William Stern: a set of well-known puzzles and puzzles was supposed to determine the developmental potential of children. However, the tests that followed to measure intelligence, including the questionnaire of the British psychologist Hans Eysenck, who made the very idea of assessing intelligence popular, were intended more for adults. Today, most IQ tests measure a person's ability to analyze visual-spatial information, assess short-term memory and data processing speed. In this case, the age of the subject must be taken into account. The questionnaires are designed in such a way that the average is equal to one hundred points. A score below 70 is believed to indicate mental retardation, and people who score above 115 are particularly smart. You can talk about outstanding abilities and even genius with an IQ above 140 points. However, according to several studies at once, the results of such tests do not always reflect the real intelligence of a person. First, you can train yourself to solve the type of tasks that are used in the questionnaires. Second, the assessments of the same person may depend on their physical and psychological condition.
Slow thinking genius
In addition, all IQ tests are strictly timed. As a rule, questions must be answered in 30-60 minutes. However, it is known that the Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, who invented the theory of relativity, thought rather slowly and did not always manage to cope with all the tasks in the allotted time during exams.
Nevertheless, the IQ of an outstanding physicist is estimated at about 160 points. During his life, he wrote more than three hundred scientific papers, developed several fundamental physical theories - in addition to the theory of relativity, the quantum theory of heat capacity, the theory of induced radiation, quantum Bose-Einstein statistics. According to American sociologists, the scientist is one of the five most famous people of the twentieth century.
Albert Einstein's IQ is estimated at about 160 points.
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The victory of the intellect over the body
Another outstanding physicist and popularizer of science, Stephen Hawking, had the same IQ as Einstein's. He studied cosmology and quantum gravity, proved that the universe obeys general relativity, and deduced the laws of black hole mechanics. His books sold in huge numbers - for example, "A Brief History of Time", which tells about the emergence of the universe, the nature of space and time, and black holes, was released with a circulation of ten million copies.
British scientist Stephen Hawking. FP 2018 / Justin Tallis.
The scientist worked hard all his life, despite the terrible diagnosis - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which turned him into an invalid.
The smartest dropout student
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, considered one of the richest people on the planet, has an IQ of 170. The Windows operating system he created in collaboration with school friend Paul Allen is now installed on almost every computer. It was thanks to her that the computer became the subject of mass use.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates. AP Photo / Nati Harnik.
At the same time, Gates did not even graduate from the university. In his second year, he was expelled from Harvard for academic failure, since he devoted all his free time to programming. But in 2007, the university administration awarded him a higher education diploma and even awarded him a doctorate.
The Scientist Who Gave Up the Million Dollars
In 2010, Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman became the most discussed scientist on the planet. He solved one of the problems of the millennium - the Poincaré hypothesis, for which the Clay Mathematical Institute awarded him a prize of one million dollars, which the scientist refused.
In addition to the only solved problem of the millennium at the moment, Perelman also proved the theory of the soul in differential geometry, the geometrization hypothesis and several key statements in the Alexander geometry of spaces of curvature bounded from below.
IQ is unknown.
Grigory Perelman. Photo: George M. Bergman, Berkeley.
Math prodigy
Australian and American scientist Terence Tao already studied mathematics at the university level at the age of nine, at the age of 13 he became the youngest winner of the International Mathematical Olympiad for schoolchildren, at the age of 14 he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and by the age of 20 he received his Ph. D. from Princeton University.
Over the years of his work, he published more than 250 scientific papers, proved a theorem that there are infinitely long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers, and substantiated the circular law in the theory of random particles. Today Tao is considered one of the smartest people on the planet. His IQ is estimated at 230 points.
Terence Tao at the University of California, 2006. Photo: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Alfiya Enikeeva