smartest people of all time

Greek doctor Evangelos Katsioulis made headlines in his home country when he won the World Genius Directory s 2013 Genius of the Year Awards. According to the site, Katsioulis IQ is a remarkable 198. He apparently scored 205 on the Stanford Binet scale with a standard deviation of 16, which is on par with 258 on the Cattell scale with a standard deviation of 24 and 198 on the Wechsler scale with a standard deviation of 15. Born in Ioannina in 1976, Katsioulis studied at Greece s Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, earning an M.Sc. in medical research and technology, a master s degree in philosophy, and a Ph.D. in psychopharmacology. In 2001 he formed the World Intelligence Network IQ society. He is currently a member of 28 IQ societies, including the exclusive Giga Society. Only 1 in 30 billion people will match his intelligence levels.

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Born in 1971, Iranian American physicist and entrepreneur Shahriar Afshar has won a number of awards for his groundbreaking inventions. Afshar is known for his 2004 Afshar experiment, which he conducted at Harvard University. The optical experiment investigates and, according to Afshar, contradicts the quantum mechanical principle of complementarity. Afshar served as an associate at Harvard between 2003 and 2004 and was a visiting scientist at Canada s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2006. He is a visiting research professor of physics at New Jersey s Rowan University as well as the president, CTO and CEO of consumer electronics startup Immerz. One of his notable inventions is the award winning 4D Soundkix mini speaker. In 1989 Afshar won a prestigious Iranian Khwarizmi International Award.

Born in India in 1981, Akshay Venkatesh is a mathematician and former child prodigy. He was brought up in Australia and showed promise from a young age, earning a bronze medal at the International Physics Olympiad in 1993, when he was just 11. A year later he achieved another bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. In 1997 Venkatesh gained a first class honors degree in pure mathematics from the University of Western Australia, having been the youngest person to ever study at the university. He then went on to obtain his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2002, at the age of 20. The math whiz has held positions at the Clay Mathematics Institute in Rhode Island and at New York University s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He currently works as a professor in Stanford University s mathematics faculty.

Born in Long Island, New York in 1940, Saul Kripke is an award winning logician and philosopher noted for the jointly developed Kripke Platek set theory, his causal theory of reference and his Kripkenstein theory. He was a child prodigy, too, having apparently learned Ancient Hebrew on his own by the time he was six before quickly grasping complex mathematics and philosophical questions. In 1980 Kripke published his hugely significant book Naming and Necessity, which discusses proper nouns within the context of the philosophy of language. Kripke has also had a significant bearing on areas surrounding mathematical logic, the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology. In 2001 he was awarded the esteemed Rolf Schock Prize. Furthermore, according to a 2009 poll, in which votes were cast by philosophers, Kripke ranked as the seventh most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He has taught at Harvard, New York s Rockefeller University, and Princeton where he is currently a professor emeritus. In addition, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the City University of New York.

Born in 1971, British mathematician and former child prodigy Ruth Lawrence made many headlines in 1985 when, aged just 13, she obtained a bachelor s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, gaining a starred first. Another degree, this time in physics, followed in 1986, and in 1989 she received her D.Phil. in mathematics, again from Oxford. In 1990 she was made a junior fellow at Harvard. And after a stint at the University of Michigan, she took on an associate professorship there in 1997. Lawrence is currently an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem s Einstein Institute of Mathematics and investigates algebraic topology and knot theory. In 1997 Charles Arthur wrote in The Independent, The branch of mathematics she is now researching

Born in 1966, Grigori Perelman is a highly influential, if somewhat eccentric, Russian mathematician. In 2002 he famously cracked the Poincar conjecture, one of topology s most weighty and complicated problems. However, the following year he reportedly quit mathematics to live with his mother in very modest circumstances in Saint Petersburg. In 2006 Perelman was honored with the esteemed Fields Medal for his work in furthering the understanding of geometry and particularly the Ricci flow, but he did not accept the award. I m not interested in money or fame; I don t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo, he explained. In 2010 he was offered the Clay Millennium Prize and one million dollars for his solving of the Poincar conjecture, but again he declined. I know how to control the universe. Why would I run to get a million, tell me? he said.

Andrew Wiles was born in Cambridge in 1953. He is an award winning English mathematician perhaps best known for officially proving Fermat s Last Theorem in 1995. Before he cracked it, The Guinness Book of World Records listed the 358 year old theorem as one of the world s most difficult mathematical problems. Wiles attained a bachelor s degree in mathematics from Oxford in 1974, followed by a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1980. He has worked as a professor at Princeton and Harvard, and in 1985 he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to spend time at Paris

Edward Witten is a scientist recognized for his research contributions to string theory, M theory, quantum gravity and supersymmetry. Born in Baltimore in 1951, Witten was originally a history major at Massachusetts Brandeis University, attaining his bachelor s degree in 1971. Five years later he obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton after first earning a master s degree from the same school. Witten has been described as the most brilliant physicist of his generation and the world s greatest living theoretical physicist. In 2004 TIME magazine included him on its annual rundown of the 100 most influential people in the world. Although he is a physicist, Witten has had a major effect on mathematics, and he has a slew of awards to his name, including the Fields Medal, the Dirac Prize, the Albert Einstein Medal and the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. He is currently a professor at Princeton s Institute for Advanced Study.

Guest appearances on TV shows such as The Simpsons, Futurama and Star Trek: The Next Generation have helped cement English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking s place in the pop cultural domain. Hawking was born in 1942; and in 1959, when he was 17 years old, he received a scholarship to read physics and chemistry at Oxford University. He earned a bachelor s degree in 1962 and then moved on to Cambridge to study cosmology. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, Hawking became depressed and almost gave up on his studies. However, inspired by his relationship with his fianc and soon to be first wife Jane Wilde, he returned to his academic pursuits and obtained his Ph.D. in 1965. Hawking is perhaps best known for his pioneering theories on black holes and his bestselling 1988 book A Brief History of Time.