I was just curious about what the I.Q.s were of some of the people in society we regard as geniuses independent of their actual I.Q.s. I know anything above 130 is supposed to place a person in the 98th-99th percentile. What kind of people have a 130 or higher?
Mind you, I do realize that not a whole lot of importance is placed on a person’s measured I.Q. I’m just feeding a curiousity.
I recall reading somewhere that Thomas Jefferson and the economist John Stuart Mill were supposed to have IQ’s that were at the top of any scale that could measure them. The problem is that they never took an IQ test, so the scores were reverse-engineered based on their writings.
I’ve seen various “cites” giving Albert Einstein’s IQ between 141 and 173 (most say about 160.) Stephen Hawking says he’s never taken an IQ test and he doesn’t care.
Marilyn vos Savant, the bane of many long-time Dopers, is supposed to have an IQ of 228.
Cecil Adams, of course, has an intelligence so unfathomable to an ordinary human that no test can be designed to measure it.
Richard Feynmann, Nobel Prize winning physicist, was widely regarded as a frightfully clever guy even by Nobel Prize winning physicist standards. According to his SAT scores, he had an IQ of 125, which is well above average but hardly exceptional for an academic. When MENSA offered him a honorary membership, he took great pleasure in telling them that, unfortunately, he was just not smart enough to meet their high demands… 
Yeah, kind of a circular argument there. This particularly sorry episode in the already checkered history of IQ tests is hilariously described in Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man”.
Is a number that high even meaningful? Is the scale calibrated that high? Isn’t that one too many significant digits?
I’ve been told by a bunch of friends that took IQ tests at various points in their lives that the results were far from consistent. One reported a 20-point swing between his highest and lowest scores.
I found the opposite. When I was applying for college, the admissions counselor pulled out my records and showed me an IQ test I didn’t even remember taking in 4th grade and an IQ test from high school. They were only one point apart. I later took one “just for fun” with a group of friends, and my score matched the higher of the earlier two exactly.
I can’t remember where I read this, but the story was that how Marilyn Vos Savant came up with that number is something like this:
As a child, she took an IQ test aimed at children, and got the ceiling score, which was high but not as high as that. However, she did not need all of the allotted time to finish the test, so she decided to multiply her score by the ratio of the time she took and the time allowed, and that is how she came up with her score of 228. Needless to say, this is not a scientifically valid technique.
According to Wikipedia, her IQ as measured with more modern techniques is around 180.
Linked is a page showing list of well known people -
http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/mismeasure/genius/research04.html
By the way - IQ scores do tell us, in general terms, which group of students are likely to succeed and which aren’t. IQ scores are used as part of the process to determine which students are admitted to ‘gifted programs’ - IQ scores are used in the legal system and can make the diffference between the death sentence and some other penality - IQ scores are also used to determine in which areas ‘special needs’ children will need additional assistance.
I’m better at tests than Copernicus! :rolleyes: Or, at least I was when I was seven.
IQ is nothing more than a measure of how good you are at taking IQ tests.
My brother has an IQ in the 140 range (I think) and some of my friends in school (who are MUCH smarter than I am but in different things) have IQ’s 30 points lower.
I understand the intellectual curiousity of the OP (I’m glad I know mine, but I don’t base my relationships with the world on the number).
So, if you needed brain surgery, it wouldn’t matter to you whether the surgeon had an IQ of 80 or 140?
Yeah, I know mine too and it was about what I would’ve figured it would be. It’s kind of cool to have a rough gauge of where you stand compared to others who’ve taken the tests but I don’t think a high or low I.Q. is an all important factor in determing a person’s success in the world.
Actually, this is one example where it really doesn’t matter at all. You’d want a surgeon to have skills and precision in performing surgery. I don’t think that intelligence helps at all. If you change the example to a doctor about to prescribe a prescription for a rare deadly disease, I’d understand your point.
In a movie about him it said at the beginning stages of his ALS he had a very bad fall down the stairs and hit his head. He was terrified that he had lost some of his mental faculties so he retook the mensa IQ test and was delighted to find he still qualified.
Actually, I doubt we could ever really know that since I have very serious doubts that there is any medical student or doctor in the United States that has an IQ of 80 or lower -
A brain surgeon isn’t just some glorified plumber. They have to have a fairly comprehensive theoretical knowledge about the brain as well as purely technical skill.
Same thing happened to me, between tests taken when I was four years old and another more than three decades later. One point difference.