40 Uber-Intelligent People Who Make Einstein’s IQ Look Minuscule

Adhara Pérez was born in Mexico in 2011, and the little girl had a tough start in life. There was bullying at school, plus she was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. But when she took an IQ test, her score was stunning. Adhara went on to finish high school aged eight, and now she’s studying online for two degrees — math and industrial engineering. This girl will go far!

Recognized as one of the most talented writers of the 19th century, Charles Dickens wrote a slew of masterpieces. In his novels, he used his fertile imagination to bring a series of unforgettable characters to life. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham, and the Artful Dodger. Dickens was also an energetic social campaigner who publicized the failings and cruelties of the Victorian era.

Born in the English country town of Shrewsbury in 1809, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was highly controversial in its day — and remains so for some, even now. The great naturalist’s trip to the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere aboard HMS Beagle furnished him with much material for his thoughts on evolution. Darwin’s reputation was sealed by his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species, published in 1859.

Judit Polgár used her formidable brains to thrive in one of the most intellectual pursuits around: top-level competitive chess. The Hungarian became an International Grandmaster in 1991 at the age of 15. Back then, this achievement made her the youngest person ever to enter those hallowed ranks. What’s more, Polgár is the only woman ever to have made it into the top ten of international chess players.

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft in 1975 along with Bill Gates, whose IQ is 160. Like Gates, he became an extremely wealthy man, with money enough to pursue a wide-ranging philanthropy. He was also active in a variety of fascinating projects, including the discovery and exploration of more than 30 ships sunk during WWII.

Born in southern England in 1791 into a poor family, Michael Faraday had only a rudimentary education as a child. In spite of his unpromising start in life, Faraday went on to become a highly successful scientist and inventor, starting out as a lab assistant. He made a number of important scientific and engineering breakthroughs, including building the world’s first ever electric motor in 1822.

Although he was born nearly three centuries ago, Immanuel Kant is still regarded as a key figure by modern philosophers. He’s best known for his work on what’s called epistemology, which is basically the study of knowledge, although his thoughts on ethics and aesthetics are also still tremendously influential. The Britannica website credits him with “[inaugurating] a new era in the development of philosophical thought.”

The artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was one of the giants of the 16th century Italian Renaissance. He’s the man responsible for the glorious frescoes that decorate the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace. And as well as being an outstanding painter, Michelangelo was a highly accomplished poet, architect, and sculptor.

Born in what is now modern Poland in 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus had the distinction of writing a book that was banned by the Roman Catholic Church for over 200 years. The book was On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and it put forward the heretical — but accurate — idea that the Earth rotated around the Sun.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us, “René Descartes (1596–1650) was a creative mathematician of the first order, an important scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician.” A Frenchman born in 1596, Descartes is credited as the originator of contemporary philosophy as we know it. He was who came up with the aphorism, “I think, therefore I am.”

Cleopatra VII, who ruled Egypt jointly with male relatives for 21 years from 51 B.C., is mostly remembered by history for her legendary beauty, her romance with Julius Caesar, and her marriage to Mark Antony. But the truth is she also had a formidable intellect. It’s said she was the master of a dozen languages and well-versed in astronomy, math, and philosophy.

An Indian born into a humble family in 1887, Srinivasa Ramanujan is recognized today as a leading mathematical genius. Sadly, he died at the age of just 32, but not before he’d come up with various mathematical formulas that stunned eminent math professors. After his death, he left notebooks filled with research that contemporary mathematicians continue to work on.

According to press reports, Adragon De Mello’s father held the unlikely belief that his son was fated to win a Nobel Prize by the time he was 16. De Mello was certainly a child prodigy, graduating with a computational mathematics degree from the University of California in 1988. He was just 11, a record at the time. But he never did become a Nobel Laureate and seems to have disappeared from public view 20 years ago.

As his name suggests, Emanuel Swedenborg was indeed a Swede, born in Stockholm in 1688. In the early part of his life, Swedenborg was known for his important contribution to the natural sciences. But as he grew older he increasingly turned to religion and published his masterwork Heaven and Hell in 1758. He claimed to have visited both of these destinations, and his book described them in detail.

A Greek born in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 335 A.D. Hypatia is remembered as an eminent philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. During her lifetime Christianity was sweeping through the Western world, but Hypatia stuck to her pagan beliefs. For this, she paid a high price. A gang of Christian fanatics murdered her in 415.

Garry Kasparov is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen. Born in Kazakhstan, Kasparov was just 12 years old when he used his formidable brain power to become the under-18 chess champion of the Soviet Union. By the time he was 22, he was world champion, the youngest player ever to hold that title.

Although born in the Polish city of Warsaw in 1867, Marie Curie lived in Paris from 1891. It was there that she carried out her groundbreaking scientific work on radioactivity. When Curie, along with her spouse Pierre, won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, she was the first woman to win the accolade. She won a second Nobel in 1911, this time for her work in chemistry.

Galileo was an Italian scientist who worked in the fields of math, astronomy, and natural philosophy. Born in Pisa in 1564, his agreement with his scientific predecessor Copernicus that the Earth orbited the Sun put him at odds with the Catholic Church. Tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, he lived the rest of his life confined to his home. In 1992 the Church finally admitted Galileo had been right all along.

One of the 19th century’s leading political philosophers, John Stuart Mill was born in London in 1806. His Scottish father had him learning Greek at the tender age of three. Mill didn’t just pontificate about politics — he got directly involved by serving as a Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons. He ruffled some Victorian feathers with his belief in compulsory education and women’s equality, radical views at the time.

As well as being an incredibly smart mathematician who contributed to the development of both differential and integral calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz was also an accomplished philosopher. Born in the German city of Leipzig in 1646, Leibnitz did attend school but used his father’s extensive library to educate himself more broadly. Although he qualified as a lawyer, Leibnitz dedicated his life to the heady realms of math and philosophy.

Born on the Italian island of Sicily in 1906, Ettore Majorana was one of the foremost theoretical physicists of his generation. He started out as an engineering student at the University of Rome, but switched to physics. He studied sub-atomic particles and became a professor at the University of Naples aged 30. The very next year Majorana vanished after embarking on a sea trip. The facts of his disappearance and presumed death remain a mystery.

In a 2007 article in Esquire magazine, journalist Mike Sager wrote, “By some accounts, Christopher Michael Langan is the smartest man in America.” Certainly Sager, born in San Francisco in 1952, has a humungous IQ. Readers Digest has described him as “an independent researcher and reality theorist,” although he doesn’t seem to have troubled the formal academic world to any extent. In fact, his day job is horse rancher.

Born in England in 1642, Sir Isaac was a bit of an all-rounder. He was an accomplished astronomer, mathematician, and author. But, of course, he’s best remembered today thanks to a piece of fruit. When he saw an apple fall from a tree, his powerful intellect turned that seemingly trivial incident into one of physical science’s most important insights. The law of gravity, no less.

Born in 1960, Richard G. “Rick” Rosner is probably best known for his many TV appearances, but he’s also worked as an exotic dancer and a bouncer. He’s said to have subjected himself to over 30 IQ tests. Rather him than us, we say. But his immense intelligence was little help when he appeared on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Rosner crashed out with just $16,000. Peeved, he sued ABC for allegedly including a dud question. He lost.

His real name was Francois Marie Arouet, but this French writer and philosopher always wrote under his pen name of Voltaire. Born in Paris in 1694, Voltaire used his biting wit to satirize the follies of France’s pampered aristocracy. He also wrote caustic critiques of the work of other philosophers. The Britannica website cites one of his best-known quotes: “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.”

James Maxwell was born in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, in 1831, into a steadfastly bourgeois family. He was just 14 when he published a paper on geometry, but he’s most renowned for his work on electromagnetic theory. It’s said that his research eventually led 20th-century scientists to quantum theory. The Britannica website points out that many scientists put Maxwell in the same league as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1990, child prodigy Sho Yano started his degree course at Chicago’s Loyola University at the age of nine. But that was just the beginning of his glittering academic career. Next, now at the advanced age of 12, Yano enrolled at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. By the time he was 21, he was an M.D. And did we mention his molecular genetics and cell biology Ph.D.?

Born into a wealthy family in 1904, by the age of 18 Nathan Leopold had already graduated from the University of Chicago. Then, he went spectacularly off the rails. In 1924 he and a friend called Richard Loeb decided to commit the “perfect” crime. They brutally kidnapped and killed a blameless 14-year-old boy they knew, Bobby Franks. Justice quickly caught up with the demonic duo and both were found guilty of murder. Loeb was murdered in jail; Leopold served 33 years, dying in 1971.

Showing that intellectual brilliance can run in the family, Sir Francis Galton was actually a cousin of Charles Darwin. Born in the English city of Birmingham in 1822, Galton studied math at Cambridge University. Among other things, his innovative studies of human intelligence and his work on using fingerprints for police work ensured his place in the pantheon of scientific greats.

If one man could be said to personify the Renaissance that swept through 15th and 16th century Italy and Europe, it has to be Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci was an artistic genius, both as a painter and sculptor. Plus, he was an inventor centuries ahead of his time who came up with designs for everything from helicopters to machine guns.

Born in 1952, at the age of five Edith Helen Stern had read the Encyclopedia Britannica in its entirety. By the age of 12 she’d enrolled at Florida Atlantic University, and by 15 she was a college-level math teacher. In the early 1970s she went to work for IBM, ending up as a vice president for research and development. Oh, and we mustn’t forget that she’s registered in excess of 120 patents.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon, about 90 miles north of London. The man’s achievements? Well how about Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet? We could go on. When it came to writing plays, he was an undoubted genius. But spelling was not his strong point. There are six attested examples of his signature, all spelled differently.

A man of many talents, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in the German city of Frankfurt in 1749. An accomplished author, Goethe was also a scientist, a geologist, and a philosopher. Einstein was an admirer and is said to have claimed that Goethe was “the last man in the world to know everything.”

With his formidable IQ, it comes as little surprise that, aged ten, Terence Tao was the youngest individual ever to pick up an award at the in the International Mathematical Olympiad. On that occasion he won a medal, but a far more lucrative prize came his way in 2015, when his work was recognized with a Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. That distinction came with a handy $3 million in prize money.

Christopher Hirata’s brilliant mind first came to public attention when he was just 13 years old. That was in 1996, when the young American took the gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad. After that impressive achievement, Hirata went on to study at the California Institute of Technology, graduating with a degree in physics when he was 18. An astrophysics Ph.D. from Princeton followed in 2005, and he’s now a professor at Ohio State University.

It was the mid-1950s, and Marilyn vos Savant was just ten years old when she took an IQ test designed for adults. Her score was phenomenal and won her a place in Guinness World Records. Appropriately enough, she writes a column in Parade magazine titled “Ask Marilyn.” If she doesn’t know the answer to your question, probably nobody does.

Born in 1856 in a part of the Austrian Empire that is now Croatia, Tesla was of Serbian heritage. He arrived in the U.S. in 1884 with four cents to his name. Tesla used his keen intelligence to work on a variety of electronic projects and experiments, although he never tried to build an electric car. Sadly, despite his obvious genius, Tesla died a lonely pauper’s death in Manhattan’s New Yorker Hotel in 1943.

Remember the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting? Well, the Will Hunter character in the film, played by Matt Damon, is apparently based on the real-life William Sidis. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1898, it’s said he was scanning the New York Times aged two, and he started at Harvard when he was just 11. But Sidis seemingly hated the public attention his prodigious intellect attracted, and he deliberately faded into obscurity in later life. He died in 1944.

Exceptionally brilliant, even in the rarified world of child prodigies, Ainan Cawley was born in Singapore in 1999. He first delivered a public lecture at the age of seven, and by nine he’d memorized the number pi to 518 decimal places. Cawley featured in a British TV documentary titled The World’s Cleverest Child and Me in 2009.

Born in 1982 in Hawaii, Michael Kearney was another child prodigy with an extraordinary IQ test score. Kearney was home-schooled — and that seems to have worked rather well, since he had four university degrees by the time he was 22. He was just 10 when he got his first degree in anthropology from the University of South Alabama. His powerful intellect has also won him more than $1 million dollars from appearances on various TV game shows.