• What child prodigy was invited to work for NASA when he was eight years old?
Who offered his wife a share of his Nobel Prize as part of a divorce settlement, three
years before he actually won his Nobel Prize?
From physicists to chessmasters, here are 15 of the smartest people who ever lived.
15 – Ruth Lawrence • Ruth Lawrence became the youngest person
ever admitted to Oxford University in 1981, at 10 years old.
• Then she became the youngest person to graduate from Oxford, at 13 years old.
• She was hailed as a child prodigy, but now she lives a quiet life as a mother of
four as an Orthodox Jewish woman in Israel, teaching math at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
14 – Noam Chomsky • Noam Chomsky is one of the most celebrated
intellectuals in American history.
• He is known for revolutionizing the way we think about language and grammar, and taught
on those topics for 50 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Chomsky’s writings on linguistics have been so influential, they have also caused
the fields of psychology and philosophy to re-think the way the brain processes information.
13 – Scott Aaronson • Scott Aaronson was accepted to Cornell
University as a freshman in high school, despite the fact that he clashed with his teachers
in school and got bad grades.
• He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley at the age of 22.
• Aaronson is currently developing the field of quantum computing, which could change the
way computers process data forever.
12 – Edward Witten • Edward Witten is one of the champions
of string theory, a controversial theory of physics that predicts the existence of a “multiverse.”
• It sounds like crazy sci-fi, but in a 1990 cosmology conference, attendees like
Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner and James Peebles were included in a vote that considered
him the smartest living physicist in the world.
11 – Stephen Hawking - 160 • Speaking of Stephen Hawking, let’s discuss
the man who is perhaps the best-known living scientist.
• Hawking’s work in the field of relativity changed the way science looks at black holes,
and has been influential in the study of the Big Bang.
• He also says we have about 100 years to escape Earth before experiencing a mass extinction
event.
So there’s that, too.
10 – Andrew Wiles - 170 • Most people who work on a math problem
might spend a few minutes on it, tops.
• Andrew Wiles spent seven years proving Fermat’s Last Theorem – setting to rest
a mathematical conjecture that had eluded the most brilliant minds on Earth since the
3rd century.
9 – Albert Einstein – 160-190 • There’s not much that can be said about
Albert Einstein that hasn’t already been said.
You already know the basics.
• But did you know the FBI spied on Einstein for 22 years, suspecting him of building a
death ray for the Soviets?
• He also offered his first wife a share in his Nobel Prize money as part of his divorce
settlement with her.
Their divorce was finalized in 1919, but he didn’t win his Nobel Prize until 1922, three
years later.
• He was just that sure he would win.
8 – Judit Polgár - 170 • Chessmasters naturally have high IQs,
because they must perform countless calculations as they consider every possibility on the
board several times over in a matter of seconds.
• Judit Polgar is one of the best.
She became the youngest chess grandmaster in history at the age of 15, breaking Bobby
Fischer’s record.
• Throughout her career, she was one of the best chess players in the world, thanks
in part to a tough schooling curriculum by her father, who used his three daughters in
an experiment to show that “geniuses are not born, but made.”
7 – Leonardo da Vinci – 180-190 • Leonardo da Vinci is well-known for many
things that were ahead of his time.
• Obviously he’s best known for his art, but he was also an eccentric that innovated
early concepts of flying machines, parachutes, and several weapons of war.
• He did not, however, create a code so Tom Hanks could find out the secrets of the
Catholic Church.
6 – Marilyn Vos Savant - 190 • Marilyn Vos Savant was found to have the
mental capacity of a 23-year-old when she was just 10, and was recognized by the Guinness
Book of World Records as having the world’s highest IQ.
• Her response to this was to criticize the IQ test as being meaningless and unreliable.
• Despite her prodigy status, she lives a quiet life in Manhattan as a columnist for
Vanity Fair, and despite being quite possibly the smartest person in the world, she seems
content to just live a modest lifestyle out of the spotlight.
5 – Garry Kasparov - 194 • Another chessmaster here, Garry Kasparov
is widely considered the greatest chessmaster in the history of the game.
• Though Kasparov had been away from the game for 12 years, he briefly returned to
tournament play in in August of 2017.
• The Russian native emigrated to the United States to avoid potential backlash from being
a vocal political opponent of Vladimir Putin. 4 – Kim Ung-Yong - 210
• Kin Ung-Yong has an IQ of 210 – once a world record – and like many people on
this list, chose to apply it to a simple life.
• Kim was invited to work at NASA at the age of 8, and remained there for 10 years.
But he hated that life, so when he turned 18, he entered an ordinary university in Korea
and took a job as a run-of-the-mill office worker.
• The media – especially in Korea – denounces him as a “failed genius,” but he says
he’s never been happier with his life.
3 – Christopher Hirata - 225 • Christopher Hirata was doing algebra in
first grade, and was in college-level physics and multivariable calculus at age 12.
• At age 16, he was working with NASA on a Mars colonization project.
• He now works as a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio State University.
2 – Terence Tao – 225-230 • There have been many child prodigies that
enter a university early and graduate before they turn 18.
• Terence Tao was one of those, getting his bachelor’s degree at age 16, and earned
a doctorate from Princeton at age 21.
• But perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is that the math genius earned full, tenured
professorship as faculty at UCLA at the age of 24.
• His colleages at the university refer to him as the “Mozart of Math.”
1 – William James Sidis – 250-300 • William James Sidis may be the smartest
person who ever lived.
• He was reading the New York Times before he turned two years old, and at age six he
was speaking English, Latin, French, German, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian.
• The child prodigy qualified for admission to Harvard at the age of 9, and eventually,
he became a phenomenon.
He was a media sensation, but he just wanted to be left alone.
• At Harvard, he was relentlessly bullied, and by the time he graduated, he wanted to
be as far away from academia as he could.
• Sidis went into hiding and started moving around the country using an alias.
He published countless books under a variety of different names before dying of a brain
hemorrhage at the age of 46.