Top 10 Smartest People in the World (Highest IQ Ever Measured)

Sidis is often seen as the ultimate example of a child prodigy gone wrong. His parents drilled him from birth to become a genius. It worked, but at a high price. He could read the newspaper when he was 18 months old.

As an adult, he withdrew from science to do simple office jobs and collect streetcar transfers. Biographies of his life often describe how he experienced his intelligence as a curse rather than a blessing.

Unlike Sidis, Terence Tao uses his gift very much in public. He is called the “Mozart of Mathematics”. At 24 he became the youngest professor ever at UCLA. He won the Fields Medal (the Nobel Prize of mathematics). Colleagues say he can solve problems others don't even dare to start on.

Marilyn is the most famous woman on this list. In the 1980s she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records with the highest score ever measured. She became world-famous with her column “Ask Marilyn” in Parade magazine, where she solves complicated puzzles sent in by readers. The most famous example is the 'Monty Hall problem', where she turned mathematicians worldwide against her (even though she was right).

Imagine: you're 13 years old and you win a gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad. That's what Christopher Hirata did. At 16 he was already working with NASA on whether humans could live on Mars. Today he is a professor working on dark energy, one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.

This South Korean child prodigy spoke four languages by the age of two. According to the stories, NASA brought him to America to work there when he was eight. After ten years, however, he returned to Korea because he was unhappy.

He deliberately chose a 'normal' life and became a civil engineer at a local company, proving that happiness matters more than achievement.

Edith Stern is one of the most prolific inventors of our time. At her birth, her father announced that he would mold “the perfect human being”. She went to university at 12 and worked for IBM for many years. She has more than 100 patents to her name. Her work at IBM led to breakthroughs in telephony and internet technology that we still use today.

Langan is often called “the smartest man in America”, but he took a very different path. He felt misunderstood at school and dropped out of college. For years he worked as a bouncer at a bar on Long Island. In his spare time he developed a complicated “Theory of Everything” (the CTMU). He is a controversial figure because he links intelligence to disputed philosophical ideas.

Rick Rosner doesn't fit the stereotype of the dusty professor at all. He is a TV writer and... a former stripper and nude model. He has taken more than 30 IQ tests to improve his score. He is obsessed with health and takes dozens of pills a day to keep his brain young. In documentaries he talks openly about his obsessive drive to be the smartest.

To many, he is the best chess player of all time. Kasparov became world champion in 1985 at the age of 22. His intelligence shows mainly in his strategic insight and memory; he can replay thousands of chess games in his head. He made world news when he took on IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue, a battle between human intuition and brute computing power.

You might be wondering: where is Einstein? The man synonymous with genius never took an IQ test. Experts estimate his score at around 160. That is very high, but lower than the rest of this list. It shows that an IQ score doesn't say everything: his biography on the Nobel Prize website proves that creativity and imagination are at least as important as raw brainpower for changing the world.