smartest people of all time

Astrophysicist Chris Hirata was born in Michigan in 1982, and at the age of 13 he became the youngest U.S. citizen to receive an International Physics Olympiad gold medal. When he turned 14, Hirata apparently began studying at the California Institute of Technology, and he would go on to earn a bachelor s degree in physics from the school in 2001. At 16 with a reported IQ of 225 he started doing work for NASA, investigating whether it would be feasible for humans to settle on Mars. Then in 2005 he went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton. Hirata is currently a physics and astronomy professor at The Ohio State University. His specialist fields include dark energy, gravitational lensing, the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clustering, and general relativity. If I were to say Chris Hirata is one in a million, that would understate his intellectual ability, said a member of staff at his high school in 1997.

Canadian visual cognition and psycholinguistics expert Steven Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954. His work covers popular science, experimental psychology, linguistics and cognitive science, and he is currently a professor of psychology at Harvard. Prior to taking up this position, between 1982 and 2003 he was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor within the school s brain and cognitive science department. During his MIT tenure, Pinker took over as the director of the university s cognitive neuroscience center. In 2004 TIME magazine featured him on its list of the 100 most influential thinkers and scientists. His awards include a Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences and a Royal Institution Henry Dale Prize. Perhaps Pinker s best known work is his 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Born in 1976, Ivan Ivec is a Croatian mathematician and IQ test specialist with according to the World Genius Directory an IQ of 174. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and works at Gimnazija A.G.Mato?a High School in Samobor, Zagreb. Ivec s website is dedicated to IQ testing and results, and his own tests cover IQ ranges of between 120 and 190. He has also worked with fellow Croatian mathematician Mislav Predavec to design such tests. Interestingly, Ivec says that the time restrictions on intelligence tests devised by psychologists are not ideal for everybody. Specifically, there are intelligent people, capable of performing complex actions and resolving complex tasks, although their speed of solving is low, he has explained.

Born in 1963 in Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan, Garry Kasparov is arguably the most famous chess player of all time. When he was seven, Kasparov enrolled at Baku s Young Pioneer Palace; then at ten he started to train at the school of legendary Soviet chess player Mikhail Botvinnik. In 1980 Kasparov qualified as a grandmaster, and five years later he became the then youngest ever outright world champion. He retained the championship title until 1993, and has held the position of world number one ranked player for three times longer than anyone else. In 1996 he famously took on IBM computer Deep Blue, winning with a score of 4 2 although he lost to a much upgraded version of the machine the following year. In 2005 Kasparov retired from chess to focus on politics and writing. He has a reported IQ of 190.

Born in Adelaide in 1975, Australian former child prodigy Terence Tao didn t waste any time flexing his educational muscles. When he was two years old, he was able to perform simple arithmetic. By the time he was nine, he was studying college level math courses. And in 1988, aged just 13, he became the youngest gold medal recipient in International Mathematical Olympiad history a record that still stands today. In 1992 Tao achieved a master s degree in mathematics from Flinders University in Adelaide, the institution from which he d attained his B.Sc. the year before. Then in 1996, aged 20, he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton, turning in a thesis entitled Three Regularity Results in Harmonic Analysis. Tao s long list of awards includes a 2006 Fields Medal, and he is currently a mathematics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Scott Aaronson is an associate professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology s electrical engineering and computer science faculty. According to his website, his research focuses on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers, and computational complexity theory more generally. Aaronson was born in Philadelphia in 1981. In 2000 he earned a bachelor s degree in computer science from Cornell, and four years later he achieved a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Then in 2012 he was given the Alan T. Waterman Award for illuminating the fundamental limits on what can be computed in the physical world and breaking important new ground in computational theory. He is known for his key contributions to algebrization and the abstract quantum Turing machine.

According to the World Genius Directory, Croatian researcher and physicist Nikola Poljak has an IQ of 183. Born in 1982, Poljak is at present an assistant research fellow and instructor in the University of Zagreb s physics department. In addition, he is an assistant research fellow at CERN, working on the collaborative A Large Ion Collider Experiment in Geneva, Switzerland. And he is also an assistant research fellow with the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, involved in the STAR detector experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. In 2010 Poljak received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Zagreb. He has carried out scientific assignments for the Croatian Ministry of Science and the Agency for Mobility and EU Programmes, and his current projects include the exploration of hadronic systems with relativistic probes.

Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1947, American physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth was smart enough to leave school a year early and go straight to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned his bachelor s, master s and doctorate degrees in physics. Guth initially began evolving his notion of cosmic inflation when he was a junior scientist at Cornell in 1979. Then in 1981 he officially put forward the theory, which is now widely accepted by many scientists. The theory suggests a time prior to the Big Bang during which the universe was able to evenly disperse itself thanks to its smaller size. This model also looks to explain more clearly the conditions that brought about the incredibly fast, exponential growth of the universe. Guth has been described as the man who put the

Born in Milwaukee in 1938, Donald Knuth is a groundbreaking computer scientist and mathematician perhaps most renowned for his multi volume tome The Art of Computer Programming. In recognition of his pioneering work, he has been referred to as the father of algorithmic analysis. Knuth is also well known for his popular 1978 open software typesetting system TeX, which is one of the world s most intricate typographical frameworks. In 1971 Knuth won the inaugural Grace Murray Hopper Award, and his other honors include the A.M. Turing Award and a National Medal of Science. Knuth obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1963 from CalTech, and he is currently a professor emeritus at Stanford.

Philosopher, cognitive scientist and political observer Noam Chomsky has been called the father of modern linguistics, and his revolutionary work has had an impact on everything from artificial intelligence to music theory. Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, at the age of 16. There, he achieved his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in linguistics, leaving in 1955 to take up a post teaching philosophy and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he presently holds the position of professor emeritus. A revered cultural icon, Chomsky is still politically active, especially when it comes to issues of American foreign policy, state capitalism and mass media news. He has written in excess of 100 books and was named the world s top public intellectual in a poll conducted in 2005.