The Shadow
Marilyn vos Savant, who was born on Aug. 11, 1946 in St. Louis, scored 228, the highest intelligence quotient (IQ) test score of any woman in history, when she was only 10.
Her score was recorded in 1956, and during the past 66 years, no woman has surpassed her score.
Only three men have scored higher, Ainan Celeste Cawley, a Singapore prodigy, 263; William James Sidis, the youngest student to be admitted to Harvard at 11, 250-300; and Terence Chi-ChenTao, an American-Australian mathematician who is a professor at UCLA, 225-330.
Born Marilyn Mach, she married at 16, divorced ten years later, only to marry again and be divorced a second time by the time she turned 35. In 1987 at 41, she married Dr. Robert Kofller Jarvik, the surgeon who developed the Jarvic-7 artificial heart.
Savant attended Washington University, but she became bored with college, dropped out and began investing in stocks.
Within five years she became a successful businesswoman, gaining enough wealth to launch her career as a professional writer, having gotten her start in writing as a high school student who was published in newspapers under a pseudonym.
Soon she was writing novels, short stories, articles for magazines and newspapers. “Parade” magazine hired her to write a column in its Sunday publication, and she found added success by writing it, “Ask Marilyn,” a column in which she answered questions that her readers posed.
Her parents felt that it was best to hide her high IQ score from the public so that she could enjoy an uncomplicated childhood, but “Guinness Book of World Letters” discovered her world setting IQ record and added her to its pages.
The category of who has the highest IQ has since been dropped by the new “Guinness World Records.”
Savant has appeared on numerous TV shows such as the “David Letterman Show,” and she is known for such published works as “I’ve Forgotten Everything I Learned in School! A Refresher Course to Help You Reclaim Your Education.”
Her book, “The Power of Logical Thinking: Easy Lessons in the Art of Reasoning and Hard Facts about Its Absence in Our Lives,” was published in 1996.
The Mega Society requires its members to have qualified via an IQ test by achieving a higher score than 99.999 percent of all who have taken the test. Savant is a member, and compared to Albert Einstein who scored a 160-190 on his IQ tests, she retains the title of being the “smartest woman in the world.”
After she married Jarvik, the press dubbed the couple “The Smartest Couple in the World.”
As for the Stanford –Benet test on which she scored 228, the test was developed by Lewis Madison Terman (1877-1956) who was in the U.S. Army, and the first to take his IQ test were the U.S. soldiers during World War I.
Ironically, Savant scored her 228 score on the IQ test in 1956, the year Terman died.
