1. Billionaire Paul Allen reportedly has an IQ of between 160 and 170. Allen was born in 1953 in Seattle and made friends with Bill Gates while still at school. He attended Washington State University but quit his studies in 1974 and then talked Gates into leaving Harvard. The following year, the pair founded Microsoft in New Mexico. After he was told that he had Hodgkin s lymphoma in 1982, Allen stepped back from Microsoft and eventually resigned i .....
2. Born in San Francisco in 1952, self educated Christopher Langan is a special kind of genius. By the time he turned four, he d already taught himself how to read. At high school, according to Langan, he tutored himself in advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all that. What s more, he allegedly got 100 percent on his SAT test, even though he slept through some of it. Langan attended Montana State University but dropped out. Rather .....
4. Marilyn vos Savant was born in 1946 in Missouri. In 1986 the columnist and author made history when she was named in The Guinness Book of World Records as the person possessing the highest IQ, with a reported score of 228. She is said to have achieved the score on the Stanford Binet test at the age of ten. In the mid 1980s, Savant also took the controversial Mega Test, scoring an IQ of 186. In the wake of her newfound fame, Parade magazine launch .....
5. With a reported IQ of 180, John H. Sununu is another individual who has proved equal to the eligibility criteria for acceptance into the Mega Society high IQ club. Born in 1939 in Havana, Cuba, Sununu studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, achieving his bachelor s degree in 1961, his master s in 1963 and his Ph.D. in 1966. After he graduated, Sununu worked as a professor at Massachusetts based Tufts Universit .....
6. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a high profile American astrophysicist and research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, and he is also Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Tyson was born in New York in 1958 and loved astronomy from a young age. In 1980 he graduated from Harvard with a bachelor s degree in physics, and he went on to earn his master s in astronomy from the University of Texas in 1983. He th .....
7. Before The Guinness Book of World Records withdrew its Highest IQ category in 1990, South Korean former child prodigy Kim Ung Yong made the list with a score of 210. Kim was born in Seoul in 1963, and by the time he turned three, he could already read Korean, Japanese, English and German. When he was just eight years old, Kim moved to America to work at NASA. At that time, I led my life like a machine. I woke up, solved the daily assigned equati .....
8. Mislav Predavec is a Croatian mathematics professor with a reported IQ of 190. I always felt I was a step ahead of others. As material in school increased, I just solved the problems faster and better, he has explained. Predavec was born in Zagreb in 1967, and his unique abilities were obvious from a young age. As for his adult achievements, since 2009 Predavec has taught at Zagreb s Schola Medica Zagrabiensis. In addition, he runs trading comp .....
9. In 2008, aged 25, Yemeni economist and scientist Manahel Thabet became the youngest person to receive a financial engineering Ph.D. magna cum laude. Thabet earned the degree at the University of Illinois and has since worked towards a second Ph.D. in quantum mathematics. In 2012 she came up with a revolutionary 350 page formula to calculate distance in space without the use of light. She also has an IQ higher than 168 and garnered a Genius of the .....
10. U.S. television writer and pseudo celebrity Richard Rosner is an unusual case. Born in 1960, he has led a somewhat checkered professional life: as well writing for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and other TV shows, Rosner has, he says, been employed as a stripper, doorman, male model and waiter. In 2000 he infamously appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, answering a question about the altitude of capital cities incorrectly and reacting by suing the sho .....
11. 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 b .....
12. 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, Pink .....
13. 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. Interesti .....
14. 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 .....
15. 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 d .....
16. 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. .....
17. 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 .....
18. 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 n .....
19. 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 w .....
20. 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 philo .....
21. 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 19 .....
23. 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 a .....
24. 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, h .....
25. 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 Nami .....
26. 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 .....
27. 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 o .....
28. 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 pro .....
29. 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 .....
30. 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 .....
