How to read these profiles
A verified IQ score requires three things to be meaningful: a named test instrument (Stanford-Binet, WAIS-IV, Mensa-administered Cattell, etc.), a documented administration (where, when, by whom), and a public score (often via press, biography, or official organization records). Even with all three, scores from different tests are not directly comparable: a 196 on a high-ceiling instrument like the Mega Test is not the same population position as a 196 on the WAIS-IV.
Historical estimates are very different. They are retrospective psychometric inferences from biographical achievements - typically from Cox (1926), Simonton, or similar studies. We include them because they are a part of the historical record, but they should be read as educated guesses, not measurements. We label them clearly throughout.
For the actual instruments behind these scores, see our historical IQ tests archive and the 1880-2024 timeline.
People who actually took an IQ test
Each entry below took a documented, named standardized test and the result is reported in press, biography, or official records.
Marilyn vos Savant
Listed in Guinness World Records (1986-1989) for highest recorded IQ. Long-running "Ask Marilyn" Parade columnist.
Terence Tao
Fields Medal (2006). Began university coursework at 9. Now a UCLA professor working in harmonic analysis and combinatorics.
Christopher Hirata
Caltech at 14, PhD at 22, MacArthur Fellow (2018). Works on dark energy and gravitational lensing.
Kim Ung-yong
Listed in Guinness World Records for highest childhood IQ. NASA staffer at 8, returned to Korea for civil engineering academic career.
Christopher Langan
Self-taught philosopher and theorist behind the "CTMU" framework. Featured in 60 Minutes and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
Evangelos Katsioulis
Founder of the World Intelligence Network and several high-IQ societies. Holds the highest verified scores on several adult high-ceiling tests.
Rick Rosner
Emmy-nominated writer (Jimmy Kimmel Live!). Holds among the highest documented scores on the Mega and Titan tests.
Edith Stern
Held over 100 patents at IBM. Subject of a deliberate intellectual enrichment program from infancy by her father.
Judit Polgár
Strongest female chess player in history. Grandmaster at 15, peak ELO 2735. Defeated 11 world champions in classical play.
Garry Kasparov
World Chess Champion 1985-2000. Highest ELO rating in history at the time. Score from a German-press administration of multiple instruments.
Bobby Fischer
World Chess Champion 1972. Score reported from his high-school testing in New York. Won the Cold War "Match of the Century" against Spassky.
Stephen Hawking
A Brief History of Time author. Hawking himself dismissed IQ talk: "People who boast about their IQ are losers." Score is widely circulated but origin is unclear.
Paul Allen
Co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. Philanthropist and Allen Institute for Brain Science founder.
Magnus Carlsen
World Chess Champion 2013-2023. Highest classical ELO in history (2882). Officially never confirmed his own number.
People whose IQ was estimated retrospectively
These are not measurements. The figures below come from retrospective biographical studies (most famously Catharine Cox's 1926 The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses) that scored historical figures based on the precocity of their documented childhood accomplishments. The methodology has been heavily critiqued; we publish them as historical artifacts of the field, not as facts.
Leonardo da Vinci
Painter, engineer, anatomist, inventor. Cox's methodology penalized da Vinci for limited childhood records; Simonton later revised the estimate higher.
Albert Einstein
No test was ever administered. The "160" figure is a popular estimate from biographical analysis; Einstein himself rejected the IQ framework as a measure of his work.
Isaac Newton
Cox scored Newton at 130 based on his childhood records, with an adult-achievement-corrected estimate of 190. The Principia (1687) is the foundation of classical physics.
Galileo Galilei
Father of observational astronomy. Cox's adult-corrected estimate; her childhood-records-based estimate was substantially lower.
Blaise Pascal
Among Cox's highest-rated subjects due to extraordinary documented childhood precocity. Developed the first mechanical calculator at 19.
John Stuart Mill
Cox's highest-rated subject. Mill's father documented his unusually rigorous childhood education extensively, providing more biographical data than any other figure in her study.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Author of Faust, scientist, statesman. One of Cox's top-rated figures, again due to unusually well-documented childhood.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Cox's methodology was criticized for under-weighting musical-domain genius: Mozart's estimate is comparatively modest despite extraordinary documented precocity.
Voltaire
Author of Candide. Cox rated him highly due to documented intellectual precocity and prolific output across genres.
Marie Curie
First woman to win a Nobel, only person to win Nobels in two sciences (physics, chemistry). No formal IQ testing; estimate is retrospective.
Nikola Tesla
AC power, induction motor, Tesla coil. Estimate from biographical analysis; no contemporaneous testing existed for Tesla's adult life.
Ada Lovelace
First computer programmer (notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine, 1843). Estimate based on documented mathematical correspondence.
Why these numbers are slippery
- Test ceilings vary. A "200" on the Mega Test is roughly equivalent to about a 170 on the WAIS-IV, because the Mega Test is built for the extreme right tail and the WAIS ceiling is much lower.
- Childhood vs adult scores. A child's ratio IQ (mental age / chronological age × 100) can exceed 200 in early years and "regress" toward 130-150 in adulthood. This is not a real cognitive decline - it is the score-equivalence shifting from the early-Binet ratio formula to the deviation IQ that adult tests use.
- Self-reported numbers are unreliable. Many "celebrity IQ" figures circulating online are unsourced or self-reported. We mark those clearly.
- The Cox method overweighted childhood documentation. Subjects whose childhoods were poorly documented (such as Leonardo da Vinci) were systematically under-estimated by Cox; subjects whose fathers wrote about them extensively (such as John Stuart Mill) were systematically over-estimated.
Want to take a real IQ test?
The figures above are about other people. If you want a contemporary score using modern norms, take our full IQ test - 60 questions, ~45 minutes, calibrated against current population data.
Take the Full IQ Test