Early life and the childhood test
Marilyn vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 11, 1946. Her father was a German immigrant and her mother Italian; as an adult she took her mother's family name, vos Savant, as her professional surname.
She sat the Stanford-Binet at her elementary school in 1956, aged 10. The 228 comes from the ratio formula used by the 1937 revision: mental age divided by chronological age, times 100.
She worked in the family clothing business through her twenties and only began writing publicly in her mid-thirties, after an Omni magazine intelligence contest in 1985 brought her national attention. She is married to Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart.
Education: a short formal record
The highest childhood score on record came with an ordinary, interrupted education. Each card is one stop.
Where she sat the 1937-revision Stanford-Binet at 10. She has said she was not treated as special afterwards.
Wrote for local newspapers under a pen name as a teenager and married young, at 16.
Took general courses at the community college in St. Louis County.
Studied philosophy but left after two years to help with the family investment business — she never finished a degree.
The Guinness World Records listing
In 1986 Guinness added a “Highest IQ” category and placed vos Savant at the top, citing her childhood Stanford-Binet result. She held it for three editions.
Guinness retired the category in 1990 because scores from different tests can't be meaningfully compared, and extreme ratio scores have unreliable confidence intervals. It was a category-wide methodological decision, not a retraction of her score. She later took Ronald Hoeflin's adult Mega Test and again scored at or near the top of its published distribution.
The Monty Hall problem (1990)
In her September 9, 1990 column, a reader asked: a car is behind one of three doors, goats behind the others. You pick a door; the host, who knows where the car is, opens another to show a goat. Should you switch?
She said yes — switching raises your odds from 1/3 to 2/3. Around 10,000 readers wrote in to disagree, roughly 1,000 of them with advanced degrees. She was right. Try it:
The result is now a staple of introductory probability courses, and a case study in how intuition fails between conditional and unconditional probability. Several of the original objectors later wrote retractions.
The “Ask Marilyn” column
“Ask Marilyn” has run in Parade since 1986 — more than 1,800 columns answering reader questions on mathematics, logic, science and everyday reasoning.
Her strength is plain-English explanation rather than original research. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1988.
Is 228 accurate?
It is a real result from a real administration, but it doesn't translate to modern tests. Ratio scores at the extreme are built on very thin samples — there are too few children near the ceiling at any age to give precise confidence intervals. Most psychometricians treat any childhood IQ above about 180 as approximate.
The 1937 Stanford-Binet and adult deviation tests also use different metrics. A defensible cross-walk puts her result around 170–180 on today's scale.
Vos Savant has neither defended 228 as a current measurement nor dismissed her ability. Her view: the score reflects the testing conventions of her time, and the work matters more than the number.
The books, stacked
Beyond the column, she has published more than a dozen books. Tap a spine.
On Fermat's Last Theorem; it criticised Andrew Wiles's proof and was poorly received by mathematicians.
In her words
“I am completely uninterested in being thought of as the smartest person in the world. I find it embarrassing.”
“A reasonable definition of intelligence is the ability to make appropriate distinctions.”
Timeline
- 1946Born Marilyn Mach in St. Louis, Missouri.
- 1956Sits the Stanford-Binet at age 10. Reported score: 228.
- 1985Wins the Omni magazine IQ contest; takes the Mega Test.
- 1986“Ask Marilyn” begins in Parade. Added to Guinness World Records.
- 1988Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
- 1990Monty Hall column draws ~10,000 letters. She is proven right.
- 2026Ask Marilyn still running, 40 years on.
References
- Guinness Book of World Records (1986–1989 editions)
- Parade Magazine — “Ask Marilyn” column archive, 1986–present
- vos Savant, M. (1990). “Ask Marilyn.” Parade, September 9, 1990
- vos Savant, M. (1992). Ask Marilyn. St. Martin's Press
- vos Savant, M. (1993). The World's Most Famous Math Problem. St. Martin's Press
- Tierney, J. (1991). “Behind Monty Hall's Doors: Puzzle, Debate and Answer?” New York Times, July 21, 1991
- Hoeflin, R. (1985). The Mega Society and the Mega Test methodology
- Skeptical Inquirer (1996). “An Interview with Marilyn vos Savant,” Vol. 20