In this article, I’m going to be talking a little bit about the top ten most intelligent people in the world. These are the world’s best and brightest, and they all have unique backgrounds and unique ways of sharing their intelligence with everyone else.
10. Judit Polgar
Judit Polgar is considered the strongest female chess player of all time. By the age of 15, she had obtained the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15. She also became the youngest player to be featured in the FIDE top 100 player list at the age of 12 and was the only female player to have been a serious candidate for the World Chess Championship.
9. Kim Ung-Yong
Kim Ung-Yong is a professor who held the Guinness World Record for having the highest IQ, at 210. The son of a medical professor and a physics professor, he had learned the Korean alphabet and 1,000 Chinese characters by the time he was one year old.
8. Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski is a theoretical physicist who’s known for her work on high energy physics and has a peculiar list of accomplishments, including a 5.00 GPA from MIT during her undergraduate years. Born and raised in Chicago, she was a student at the Edison Regional Gifted Center and later graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
7. Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov is a chess grandmaster, writer, and commentator. At the age of 22, he became the youngest World Chess Champion after defeating Anatoly Karpov. He ultimately held onto the title until 1993, when he set up the Professional Chess Association, after getting into a dispute with the International Chess Federation.
6. Andrew Wiles
Andrew Wiles is a mathematician who specializes in numbers theory. For his work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, he was given the Abel Prize in 2016. He also received the Copley Medal, which is awarded by the Royal Society for outstanding achievements in science, in 2017. Some of the other awards that he’s received include the Fermat Prize, Schock Prize, Junior Whitehead Prize, and Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
5. Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist who is best known for inventing the World Wide Web. Not only did he implement the first web server and browser, but he also helped foster the internet’s subsequent development. He currently directs the W3C, which develops standards and tools to further its potential. He’s also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Oxford.
4. Magnus Carlsen
Magnus Carlsen is a five-time World Chess Champion who’s known for using a variety of openings to his advantage. As a young child, he showed an aptitude for intellectual challenges. He was able to solve 50-piece jigsaw puzzles at the age of two and enjoyed assembling complex Lego sets by the time he was four.
3. Edward Witten
Edward Witten is a theoretical and mathematical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity, string theory, and quantum field theories. He’s also regarded as the founder of M-theory. In 1990, he became the first physicist to receive the Fields Medal, one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive, for his mathematical insights.
2. Christopher Langan
Christopher Langan is often described as “the smartest man in America” with an IQ between 195 and 210. As a child, he often skipped grades and was bullied by his peers. During his last years of high school, he began teaching himself advanced physics, math, Latin, Greek, and philosophy, after being denied more challenging materials by his teachers.
1. Terence Tao
Terence Tao is a mathematician who specializes in partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, geometric combinatorics, algebraic combinatorics, and compressed sensing, among other topics. To date, he has written more than three hundred research papers and is considered one of the greatest living mathematicians in the world. In fact, he’s often regarded as the “Mozart of mathematics.”
Resources
- https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/who-has-the-highest-iq
- https://www.tuko.co.ke/facts-lifehacks/celebrity-biographies/450848-who-smartest-person-world-top-list/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan#:~:text=Christopher%20Michael%20Langan%20%28born%20March%2025%2C%201952%29%20is,smartest%20man%20in%20America%22%20or%20%22in%20the%20world%22.
