Yahoo! had a link to a search list that led to The IQ of Famous People No. 1 which has additional lists to link to.
I was most astonished with Muhammad Ali (IQ = 78) but there are others there as frightening in the other direction.
Whose IQ (that you can more or less verify as accurate) is at least as surprising to you?
Ali was dyslexic so I’m guessing his score had a lot to do with that.
I’m pretty sure that’s an ad. I’m almost positive that I’ve seen that list other places, and never with the same IQ totals for the same people.
That website says that they got the IQ scores from Catherine Cox Miles.
She died in 1984.
The site also lists the IQ of Ellen Muth, who was born in 1981.
The site also lists tons of celebrities and politicians who no one had probably heard of until well after Ms Miles joined the eternally slumbering.
Anyone else see a problem with this?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the website is complete BS. Sorry.
Worse than that, her book was published in 1926. Further, the book is not taken very seriously by modern psychologists.
Ali’s appears to be from his 1964 Armed Forces qualifying test.
Jayne Mansfield claimed to have a 140+ IQ. Maybe she did, and maybe not. But the only evidence for it is her word.
I never knew the source – probably less reliable than this one 
– but long ago I heard that Joe DiMaggio and Perry Como and maybe even Sinatra were in the double-digit zone. It always bugged me.
Hard to believe. Ali held his own in verbal sparring with Howard Cosell as I recall.
James Woods and Sharon Stone supposedly both have genius level IQs.
Source: James Woods and Sharon Stone.
Isn’t half the population in the double-digit zone by definition? Shrewdness and street smarts may be correlated to IQ. Or may not. IQ works a lot better for saying how well you’ll do in school than for anything else.
I’d bet lots of money that most people have never been formally tested to get an IQ score that is meaningfully comparable to anybody else’s for these purposes. Real IQ tests take hours to administer. I’m not sure that Army IQ tests are the same as those for the general population either.
I’d say that any IQ score you’ve ever heard about for a celebrity is BS.
Yeah! And he demonstrated a great deal of mental agility up until his disability took over.
Ali is a very intelligent man. The score of 78 is either wrong or an indicator that IQ scores are not reliable measures of intelligence.
I’m not about to argue.
Wiki says Ali was initially refused by Armed Forces due to abysmal spelling so NDP is probably right about the dyslexia. Assuming the 78 and its source are both correct.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he tanked it. He didn’t have nothin’ against no Viet Congs, after all.
Maybe it’s missing a digit. All the others on the page are allegedly high IQs, and he’s the only one with a low IQ listed. It seems out of place. Perhaps it should be 178.
Andy Warhol is listed as 86. On multiple pages. They seem to have something against Warhol.
There are also a rather remarkable number of people listed as 200+.
I went to the page in the OP’s link, then clicked on list no. 4, and saw Copernicus listed with an IQ of 160. Go Copernicus! Not bad for a 16th century dude.
Tied with Stephen Hawking… and Reggie Jackson.
Anybody know what Copernicus’s career batting average was?