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The figure of 160 for Stephen Hawking is widely circulated in popular accounts but its origin is not well documented. Hawking himself stated in a 2004 New York Times interview, "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers." He repeatedly declined to take publicized IQ tests during his lifetime.

Hawking's actual contributions include theoretical work on black-hole radiation (Hawking radiation, 1974), singularity theorems with Roger Penrose, and the popularization of cosmology through A Brief History of Time (1988, over 25 million copies sold). He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009.

He was diagnosed with motor neuron disease at 21 and lived with it for 55 years - far longer than any expected prognosis at the time. His Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society memberships and his Companion of Honour are part of an academic record that, by any external measure, did not require the 160 figure to be impressive.