There is no documented IQ test for Stephen Hawking. The 160 is repeated everywhere without a source, none of his biographies record a result, and when asked, he said he didn't know — and that people who boast about their IQ are losers.
Tracing the 160
A late reader, then a diagnosis at 21
Born in Oxford on January 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day after Galileo's death — Hawking grew up in St Albans in an eccentric, bookish household where the family read at the dinner table. He didn't learn to read until he was eight.
In 1963, at 21, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. The prognosis was about two years.
Education, widening like a light cone
Each stage opens wider than the last — from a middling pupil in St Albans to a Cambridge doctorate.
An average pupil his classmates nonetheless nicknamed “Einstein”. With friends and maths teacher Dikran Tahta he built LUCE, a simple computer made from clock parts and old switchboard relays.
Won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, at 17 — his father wanted medicine, he chose physics.
Bored by the course, he reckoned he worked about 1,000 hours in three years; a borderline result earned an oral exam, which won him a first.
Hoped to study with Fred Hoyle but was assigned Dennis Sciama. Thesis: “Properties of Expanding Universes”.
Shared Cambridge's Adams Prize for his essay on singularities and the geometry of space-time.
Smaller black holes burn hotter
Quantum effects at the event horizon make black holes glow faintly and slowly evaporate. Temperature rises as mass falls; lifetime shrinks with the cube of the mass. Drag the mass.
With Roger Penrose he had already shown when singularities must form in general relativity; later came the no-boundary proposal with James Hartle (1983) and decades of work on the information paradox. He held Newton's Lucasian Chair at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009. Hawking radiation has never been observed, which is why he never won a Nobel Prize.
Copies sold — he joked that many buyers never got past chapter one.
FRS (1974), Albert Einstein Medal (1979), Wolf Prize (1988), Companion of Honour (1989), Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009), Special Breakthrough Prize (2013).
Died in Cambridge on Pi Day, Einstein's birthday. His ashes rest in Westminster Abbey near Newton and Darwin.
The rest of the work, on both sides of the horizon
Research for physicists on one side, books for everyone else on the other — beyond Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.
Showed general relativity predicts a Big Bang singularity.
A black hole's horizon area can never decrease — a hint that black holes have entropy.
With James Bardeen and Brandon Carter: black holes obey laws like thermodynamics.
With George Ellis: a demanding textbook still used by researchers.
A quantum state for the universe with no beginning edge in time.
With Don Page: when black holes form in a hot, curved space-time — later key to string theory's holography.
Argued the laws of physics prevent time travel into the past.
Essays and lectures.
An illustrated sequel to A Brief History of Time.
With Leonard Mlodinow: a shorter, simpler version.
The first of a children's series with his daughter Lucy.
With Mlodinow: argued physics can explain the universe without a creator.
A short memoir.
Published posthumously.
“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
Timeline
About the 160
Hawking appears on famous-IQ lists because the number is so widely cited, not because it was measured. Treat it as press circulation.
Sources
- Hawking, S. — New York Times interview (2004)
- Hawking, S. (1988). A Brief History of Time. Bantam
- Ferguson, K. (2011). Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work. Bantam
- Royal Society biographical archive (FRS 1974)
- Hawking, S. & Penrose, R. (1970). Proceedings of the Royal Society A
- Hawking, S. (1974). “Black hole explosions?” Nature 248
- Westminster Abbey interment record (2018)