Have you ever found yourself sitting and thinking to yourself “Who is currently the smartest person in the world?” If you have, don’t worry- it’s normal and many people do it but the problem is that this question is a tough one to answer mainly because of how “smart” can be interpreted. There are many intelligent people with IQs that can hardly be rivaled but there are also people with slightly lower IQs than these, who have made some of the greatest contributions to their fields of science. This rules that the IQ levels in lists such as the ten smartest states in America are unreliable as far as showing a person’s true intellectual and creative merit and what they are capable of accomplishing with the intellectual resources they have.
The history of mankind knows many exceptional minds which have lived both in recent times and many centuries ago. Take for example Einstein himself – setting grounds for modern day physics and pushing the boundaries of science with his eccentric mind, this man managed to influence generations of people who don’t even specialize in science. Going back, we have many more people who intelligence touches boundaries with fiction. Look at Nikola Tesla, the father of the electric energy supply and electronics as we know them today, famed inventor and an all around underappreciated contributor to the world as we know it. The man never made blueprints, never measured or schemed his inventions. He claimed being from other worlds brought them to him and he just transferred them on paper as drawings out of his visions. Tesla could be and largely was considered as crazy as crazy gets by many but still managed to be remembered as one of the brightest minds in history.
Leonardo Da Vinci, a man centuries ahead of his time, Johann von Goethe and many more can be dubbed some of the smartest people to ever walk the Earth but there was no way to measure their intelligence back then. The only thing we know about many of the supposedly most intelligent people is what they left behind.
However, like many other instances of ranking, we will keep this list to the highest measured IQs. The people you are about to see and their stories don’t include making groundbreaking discoveries. They are all miraculously intelligent and their lives are extremely unusual. Even so, they are not ranked by any order. They are all tied for the position and you are left to decide for yourself. After researching the matters, we have narrowed down the list to three people. Let’s look at them.
3. Kim Ung-Yong
IQ Level – 210
Born back in 1963 in South Korea, Kim Ung-Yong might have seemed like any other child when he was unable to walk or talk but it wasn’t long before he learned to do both. In fact, the young Ung-Yong learned to speak efficiently at six months old. Yes, you read that right, he learned to communicate effectively with other people before he was even close to being a year old.
By the time this child prodigy turned three years old, he could speak a variety of languages which include Japanese, variations of Korean, English and German. His parents had noticed long before that that their son was quite unlike the other children around him but everything continued normally for him. A couple of years later, Kim Ung-Yong was already writing poetry, articles and essays in Chinese and Korean.
After an article about him was published in a popular magazine, he got an offer to study in Los Angeles, which he went on to do. At the same time he scored about 200 on an IQ test.
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2. Christopher Hirata
IQ Level: 225
Christopher Hirata is the person who can righteously say that his education, at least in the early years of it was a total waste. By the age of three, the young Hirata would make up his own games at the grocery store but unlike other children, his one consisted of calculating the overall bill, tax and discounts and quantizing the products by weight and other measures.
Hirata first became famous when he won an international physics olympiad at the age of 13 where we became the youngest medalist in the history of the competition. One year later, he enrolled in Caltech which did not prevent him from starting to collaborate with NASA scientists at the age of 16 on a project that researched the possible colonization of Mars.
Hirata earned his PhD in astrophysics from Princeton at the age of 22, an age when most of us are still busy figuring out how to work with a washing machine.
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1. Terence Tao
IQ Level: 225-230
The last person who would be a suitable answer to the question “who is currently the smartest person in the world?” is Terence Tao. Tao was born in 1975 and by the time he was two, he was already teaching a five-year-old how to deal with arithmetics. At eight years old he was already teaching calculus at a high school. A year later, Tao already attended mathematics courses at university levels.
He went on to compete in an international mathematics olympiad in 1986, 1987 and 1988 where he won all three medals in these consecutive years, effectively becoming the youngest holder of all three in the history of the competition.
Terence Tao enrolled in university at the age of fourteen, publishing his first assistant paper the following year. At the age of sixteen he received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree and earned his PhD at 21.
Tao is the youngest appointed professor at UCLA.
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