Marilyn Vos Savant
Marilyn Vos Savant is the highest IQ (228) record holder who is popular for her “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine. This American IQ record holder has various achievements under her name. She became popular due to her taking both the Stanford-Binet test, which resulted in her IQ score of 228, and the Mega test in the mid-1980s that estimated her IQ to be 186. In this article, we will look into the life of the world’s highest IQ woman, Marilyn Vos Savant’s IQ.
Marilyn Vos Savant: World’s Highest IQ Woman
Marilyn was born on August 11, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her initial name was Marilyn Mach. She was born to Joseph March and Marina Vos Savant. Due to the uniqueness of her surname, Vos Savant, which was a mixture of both her grandparents’ names, she chose to go by Vos Savant. It meant someone learning. Growing up, she would work in her father‘s general store as well as write for the local newspaper using a pseudonym. She married early, around 16 years old, but divorced in the next few years. She remarried again, but the marriage ended when she was 35 years old.
Early Years of Marilyn Vos Savant
She studied at the Meramec Community College and later at Washington University in St. Louis to study philosophy. Her decision to quit college and help her family in the investment business was due to her shared passion for business. To pursue her passion for writing and quench her curiosity, she moved to New York in the 1980s. Here, she pursued a career as a writer. She wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz contest questions, which were based on intelligence quotients.
Marilyn was added to the Guinness Book of World Records under the category of highest IQ from 1985 to 1989. She was also added to the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame by the year 1988. This highest IQ category was retired by the Guinness Book due to the category being too unreliable in the 1990s. She took intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet test, when she was just 10 years old. Marilyn Vos Savant’s IQ was at a score of 228, which measured her mental age as being 22 years and 10 months. By being added to the Guinness Book, she became the IQ 228 record holder. She also took another test, the Mega Test by Ronald K. Hoeflin, in the mid-1980s. Her raw score was reported to be 46 out of the possible 48, and her z-score was around 5.4, which provided her IQ to be around 186. This test is highly criticized by various professionals due to its improper design.
Ask Marilyn Columnist
Her journey to ask Marilyn columnist started after she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the IQ 228 record holder. She started writing the column for Parade magazine in 1986. This was something she loved and kept on writing for many decades. The column was an absolute hit, where she would answer questions on various subjects. Ask Marilyn became a national sensation, where readers would submit their questions from all around the world. She would solve logical mathematical puzzles that readers would ask. The world’s highest IQ woman had to answer various difficult questions like the Monty Hall problem, the two boys problem, Fermat’s last theorem, etc.
Monty Hall problem
In the Monty Hall problem, she was asked a question that resembled the scenario of a game show, Let’s Make a Deal, hosted by Monty Hall. The question was if there are three doors and behind one door, there is a car, and behind the other two, there are goats. You pick one door, and the host decides to open one door, and behind that door, there is a goat. He offers you to pick door number two. Will you switch your choice in this scenario? To which she answered, “It would be wise to switch to door number two, as it had a ⅔ probability of success, while door one just had the probability of ⅓.
Two boys’ problem
Another one of the famous problems was the two boys problem, where she was asked a question about a shopkeeper who has two new baby beagles but does not know whether they are male, female, or a pair. You tell her you want a male, and she telephones a guy who bathes the dogs, and the person replies that yes, one is male. So what is the probability the other one is male? To which Marilyn answered the probability to be ⅓; even this caused a lot of readers to write to her, arguing that the probability would be 50-50.
Family Life of IQ Record Holder Female Marilyn Vos Savant
Marilyn married Dr. Robert Jarvik in 1987, who was the co-developer of the Jarvik 7 artificial heart. She served on the board of directors of the National Council of Economic Education and on the advisory board of the National Association for Gifted Children and was also a part of the National Women’s History Museum. Her marriage to Robert was built on mutual respect, shared interest, and family devotion towards each other. They were extremely popular for their ballroom dancing and cultural outings in New York. She was named as one of the five standing speakers of 1999 for Toastmasters International. She was also awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from the College of New Jersey in the year 2003.
World’s highest IQ woman Marilyn Vos Savant’s IQ made her an exceptional woman who was known for her intelligence, resilience, and passion for challenging the world to think differently. She believed in constant learning, which helped her in her personal growth as well as her contribution towards the enrichment of society.
