Who had the highest I.Q., ever?
Who is the smartest living person?
You have to ask that question on this message board?!
Zev Steinhardt
Marilyn Vos Savant has the highest tested IQ. No one knows who the smartest person is, we still don’t know how to measure it.
me is
Any living teenager - just ask them
Marilyn cheated.
Guys, I’m talking about a real person, not a trademakred characther 
Actually, as has been posted before, most numbers quoted as IQ scores are misunderstood. It depends on what test was given, in what year, and what the age of the test-taker was, among other things. Each IQ test is normed independently. The only place they even theoretically mean the same thing is at 100. Theoretically, IQ=Intelligence Quotient=Mental Age divided by Chronological Age. So if a 3-year-old does as well as the average 6-year-old, supposedly she has an IQ of 200. Obviously we don’t expect an 80-year old to do twice as well as a 40-year-old, so after adulthood it is not calculated in exactly the same way. And it’s certainly not guaranteed that the 3-year-old will, at 6, be as capable as a 12-year-old. If there are any licensced psychologists or statisticians out there, they could probably explain it more clearly.
Anyway, the point is that much of the time, the ridiculously high scores quoted are based on an extrapolation of a test given to a relatively young child. The testing of the intelligence of very young children is difficult, so the results really should only be interpreted as an approximation or guideline, and not an absolute fact. So many things can affect the results for someone that young.
It’s also possible to create an amazingly high score via the practice effect. If you keep repeatedly taking similar tests, you will start to do better and better on them, especially if you get the chance to see what your wrong answers were. This really makes the later tests invalid measurements, but it has been done by unethical people just to produce a very high score.
IQ tests have only been given recently and in a limited geographic area. A difference of a few points is meaningless.
There is justifiable debate over what, exactly, an IQ test measures. For sure, it means that the person taking the test thinks in a similar way to the people who created the test. (Some tests are more “culture fair” than others.) A high score may mean that the person thinks quickly or logically, and is not frightened of the situation, and has been given the opportunity to develop potentials. Some people whom everyone seems to identify as “smart” do poorly on the standardized multiple choice type of test because they are able to see ways that more than one of the answers might be correct. A person who is truly non-literate, who had never had the opportunity to learn to read, would probably perform differently even on tests that did not require him to read, simply because his mind had developed differently. Yet he might still be extraordinarily intelligent and have a fantastic memory.
And of course, there is wide disagreement on exactly what “smart” means. Is it logic? Learning ability? Does creativity come into the picture? How about processing speed? If we both get the same answers, but I take 20% longer than you do, does that mean you are 20% smarter than me? Or does it just mean I am thinking more thoroughly rather than jumping to conclusions?
So, to answer both your questions, it is impossible to know, and is probably irrelevant anyway.
Kudos to MLS for a thorough, thoughtful answer.
The question of who was the “smartest” person ever is one that is not really answerable, as the concept of “smartness” is an amorphous one, not subject to a single precise definition, and not amenable to exact measurement.
A person of a particular religious preference might argue that the founder of his movement was the smartest person ever, as they credit him (or her) with having come up with the best answers to some of the most essential and difficult questions in life. If the things Jesus or Buddha said, for instance, are all true, then certainly either would qualify as an outstanding genius.
The question of who had the highest I.Q. is another matter. Deciding who had the highest I.Q., as opposed to who was the smartest person, is a little like determining who won the most beauty contest as opposed to arguing who was the most beautiful woman in history.
There have been various guesses as to who had (or would have had) the highest I.Q.
In the 1930s there was an extensive study made, which was undertaken with great seriousness, to determine the I.Q.s of various famous people in history whom the evaluators never had a chance of meeting. Very possibly this study was worthless, but it gets quoted fairly often anyway. Stephen Jay Gould does a good job of lampooning it in his book The Mismeasure of
Man.
This study determined that the smartest person ever was the 19th Century libertarian philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. He appears to have this distinction in large part because so much data was available about remarkable things he accomplished in his childhood. (IIIC, he cowrote a scholarly book on the history of India when he was 12). Mill’s father was a prominent academic, and they seem to have had a relationship
similar to the one Mozart and his father appear to have enjoyed–that is, the loving relationship of a prize show dog and his trainer.
Another person frequently named as possibly having the highest I.Q. is William James Siddis, who, like Mill, was raised by brilliant parents with the express intent of developing him into a prodigy.
He is said to have spoken forty languages. Friends described how he could read a crossword puzzle’s clues, then do the puzzle complete in his head without pausing. If IIRC, he entered Harvard at the age of 11, having actually qualified for admission several years earlier.
Siddis lectured a learned society of mathematicians on four dimensional gemoetry when he was only eight. Siddis is credited with having developed a theory of black holes decades before any astronomer or physicist, and to have made a scholarly study of the influence of the Iriquois Federation on the thinking of the Founding Fathers with respect to democratic government years before this occured to any professional historian. In his lifetime, however, Siddis only published one book: an odd, obsessive work about collecting bus tokens and transfers.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Siddis is said to have had only had one case; he sued The New Yorker over an article about him written by James Thurber, who suggested that he was a failure and a fake. He won.
After a brief involvement in radical politics after college, Siddis spent most of his life in quiet obscurity working in various positions in the Boston area as a janitor and a clerk. It appears he preferred a simple, anonymous life after having been put on show so often in his early life. He also had a strongly held belief that people should not seek credit for their accomplishments, and shouldn’t show off.
My opinion is based on nothing, really, but I have long suspected that Siddis may have been the inspiration for the Mickey Spillane novel The Twisted Thing, in which Mike Hammer meets an incredibly unhappy child who has been the subject of a series of experiments since birth designed to turn him into an outstanding genius. I also wonder if he was an influence on J. D. Salinger when he wrote the spooky story about the boy genius who scares the hell out of scientists who interview him.
As for Vos Savant, my favorite story about her is about a time she was scheduled to be interviewed on KMOX, the CBS radio station in St. Louis. She didn’t show. When she was called to ask why she was not there, she explained (rather patronizingly, I expect), that she was supposed to be there tomorrow. As near as I can remember, her explanation was that her interview was set for October 1st, and today, of course, was September 31st.
As longtime on-air personality Jack Carney observed at the time: “hey: it could happen to anybody”.
Dunno, but every single person I know fancies themselves to be of above-average IQ. Don’t have cite but read a poll somewhere that 98% of people think they’re “above average” in intelligence and none thought that they were “below average”.
Everyone on Internet message boards claim that their IQ is 135-185 or something. Where are all the “average” 100ers?
I’m a rebel… I declare that my IQ’s exactly 100.
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