Home › Famous IQs › Christopher Hirata

Christopher Hirata's childhood IQ has been widely reported in the range of 225 on a Stanford-Binet test administered when he was about 12 years old. He won the gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad at age 13 - the youngest American to do so - and entered Caltech at 14.

He completed his Caltech bachelor's degree in physics at 18 and his Princeton PhD in astrophysics at 22. NASA hired him for the Mars mission at 16. He is currently a professor at Ohio State University, working on dark energy, weak gravitational lensing, and the cosmic microwave background.

Hirata was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His childhood score sits in the same retrospective bucket as other ratio-IQ figures from the late 1980s and early 1990s: extraordinarily high, with documented test administration, but not directly translatable to a modern deviation IQ value.