Meet Marilyn Vos Savant, The Smartest Woman In The World

Marilyn Vos Savant is an American columnist, author, lecturer, the person with the highest recorded intelligence quotient (IQ) in the Guinness Book of Records, and unanimously the smartest woman in the world.

Marilyn was born on August 11, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Joseph Mach and Marina Vos Savant. As a teenager,  she worked in her father’s store and wrote for local newspapers using pseudonyms.

She went to Meramec Community College and studied philosophy at Washington University but quit two years later to help with a family investment business.

She moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue a career in writing, She wrote the popular column “Ask Marilyn” where she answers questions on many academic subjects and the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest which included intelligence quotient (IQ) quizzes and expositions.

How Smart Is Marilyn?

Marilyn was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under “Highest IQ” from 1985 to 1989 and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988.

Guinness cited Marilyn’s performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet,  test at age ten. She took another test in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score, and the Hoeflin’s Mega Test in the mid-1980s yielded a score of 186.

Marilyn sees IQ tests as measurements of a variety of mental abilities and thinks intelligence entails so many factors that “attempts to measure it are useless”. She has held memberships with the high-IQ societies Mensa International and the Mega Society

Professional Life

Marilyn served as the Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart Inc, on the board of directors of the National Council on Economic Education, and on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women’s History Museum.

As a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Toastmasters International named her one of “Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999”, and in 2003 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The College of New Jersey.

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