Who was the smartest person in the history of our species? Solomon, Albert Einstein, Jesus, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Leonardo de Vinci, Stephen Hawking—who would you name. We’ve had several individuals who broke the curve relative to intelligence. As defined by the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, IQ:
“an intelligence test score that is obtained by dividing mental age, which reflects the age-graded level of performance as derived from population norms, by chronological age and multiplying by100: a score of100 thus indicates a performance at exactly the normal level for that age group. Abbreviation: IQ”
An intelligence quotient or IQ is a score derived from one of several different intelligence measures. Standardized tests are designed to measure intelligence. The term “IQ” is a translation of the German Intellizenz Quotient and was coined by the German psychologist William Stern in 1912. This was a method proposed by Dr. Stern to score early modern children’s intelligence tests such as those developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simin in the early twentieth century. Although the term “IQ” is still in use, the scoring of modern IQ tests such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is not based on a projection of the subject’s measured rank on the Gaussian Bell curve with a center value of one hundred (100) and a standard deviation of fifteen (15). The Stanford-Binet IQ test has a standard deviation of sixteen (16). As you can see from the graphic below, seventy percent (70%) of the human population has an IQ between eighty-five and one hundred and fifteen. From one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and thirty you are considered to be highly intelligent. Above one hundred and thirty you are exceptionally gifted.
What are several qualities of highly intelligent people? Let’s look.
QUALITIES:
- A great deal of self-control.
- Very curious
- They are avid readers
- They are intuitive
- They love learning
- They are adaptable
- They are risk-takers
- They are NOT over-confident
- They are open-minded
- They are somewhat introverted
You probably know individuals who fit this profile. We are going to look at one right now: John von Neumann.
JON von NEUMANN:
The Financial Times of London celebrated John von Neumann as “The Man of the Century” on Dec. 24, 1999. The headline hailed him as the “architect of the computer age,” not only the “most striking” person of the 20th century, but its “pattern-card”—the pattern from which modern man, like the newest fashion collection, is cut.
The Financial Times and others characterize von Neumann’s importance for the development of modern thinking by what are termed his three great accomplishments, namely:
(1) Von Neumann is the inventor of the computer. All computers in use today have the “architecture” von Neumann developed, which makes it possible to store the program, together with data, in working memory.
(2) By comparing human intelligence to computers, von Neumann laid the foundation for “Artificial Intelligence,” which is taken to be one of the most important areas of research today.
(3) Von Neumann used his “game theory,” to develop a dominant tool for economic analysis, which gained recognition in 1994 when the Nobel Prize for economic sciences was awarded to John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash, and Richard Selten.
John von Neumann, original name János Neumann, (born December 28, 1903, Budapest, Hungary—died February 8, 1957, Washington, D.C. Hungarian-born American mathematician. As an adult, he appended von to his surname; the hereditary title had been granted his father in 1913. Von Neumann grew from child prodigy to one of the world’s foremost mathematicians by his mid-twenties. Important work in set theory inaugurated a career that touched nearly every major branch of mathematics. Von Neumann’s gift for applied mathematics took his work in directions that influenced quantum theory theory of automation, economics, and defense planning. Von Neumann pioneered game theory, and, along with Alan Turing and Claude Shannon was one of the conceptual inventors of the stored-program digital computer .
Von Neumann did exhibit signs of genius in early childhood: he could joke in Classical Greek and, for a family stunt, he could quickly memorize a page from a telephone book and recite its numbers and addresses. Von Neumann learned languages and math from tutors and attended Budapest’s most prestigious secondary school, the Lutheran Gymnasium . The Neumann family fled Bela Kun’s short-lived communist regime in 1919 for a brief and relatively comfortable exile split between Vienna and the Adriatic resort of Abbazia. Upon completion of von Neumann’s secondary schooling in 1921, his father discouraged him from pursuing a career in mathematics, fearing that there was not enough money in the field. As a compromise, von Neumann simultaneously studied chemistry and mathematics. He earned a degree in chemical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich and a doctorate in mathematics (1926) from the University of Budapest.
OK, that all well and good but do we know the IQ of Dr. John von Neumann?
John Von Neumann IQ is 190, which is considered as a super genius and in top 0.1% of the population in the world.
With his marvelous IQ, he wrote one hundred and fifty (150) published papers in his life; sixty (60) in pure mathematics, twenty (20) in physics, and sixty (60) in applied mathematics. His last work, an unfinished manuscript written while in the hospital and later published in book form as The Computer and the Brain, gives an indication of the direction of his interests at the time of his death. It discusses how the brain can be viewed as a computing machine. The book is speculative in nature, but discusses several important differences between brains and computers of his day (such as processing speed and parallelism), as well as suggesting directions for future research. Memory is one of the central themes in his book.
I told you he was smart!
