A person is smart or intelligent to the extent they are capable of learning or acquiring knowledge and using it in novel ways. A person’s smartness is also indicated by their problem-solving abilities. There were many smart people in human history such as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, etc. However, do you know about the smartest people in the world who are now living, and sharing this planet with us?
Well, below is an interesting list of the 27 Smartest People in the world:-
1. Elon Musk
Elon Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs and richest business magnates on the planet right now. He is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He has dreams of colonizing Mars.
Also read: Elon Musk Net Worth & Lesser-known Interesting Facts
2. Edward Witten
Edward Witten is one of the most brilliant physicists of our time. He has made important contributions to the field of quantum gravity, String theory, M-theory, and supersymmetry.
3. Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics. His work revolutionized fields as varied as artificial intelligence and music theory. Chomsky is one of the most important public intellectuals on the planet.
4. Manahel Thabet
Manahel Thabet is a scientist, economist, and consultant. Her IQ is 168 which puts her in the 0.1% of the human population with the highest IQs.
5. Judit Polgár
Polgár became a chess grandmaster when she was only 11 years old. She was a child prodigy and her father raised her with the philosophy “geniuses are made, not born.”
6. Andrew Wiles
Andrew Wiles is an English mathematician who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1995. This 358-year old problem was considered one of the most difficult math problems.
7. Grigori Perelman
Perelman was awarded Field Medal, widely considered as Nobel in Mathematics, for his work. However, he refused the award saying he wasn’t interested in money or, fame.
8. John Sununu
Sununu is a mechanical engineer. He is also a member of Mega Society, a society that consists of people with very high IQ scores. His IQ is 180.
9. Ruth Lawrence
Lawrence was a child prodigy. She is a mathematician who obtained her bachelor’s degree from Oxford at the age of 13.
10. Magnus Carlsen
The chess veteran Garry Kasparov used to privately coach Carlsen until 2010. He is the youngest person to rank first in the World Chess Champion.
11. Saul Kripke
In his teenage, Kripke wrote a series of papers that made important contributions in the field of modal logic.
12. Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister who was born in Israel after the state’s establishment. He possesses an IQ of 180.
13. Akshay Venkatesh
Venkatesh won the International Mathematical Olympiad when he was just 11. He also obtained a Ph.D. from Princeton at the age of 20.
14. Shahriar Afshar
Shahriar Afshar is an Iranian American Physicist, entrepreneur, and inventor. He has made many ground-breaking inventions.
15. Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is a psycho-linguistics and visual cognition expert. He also counts as one of the most influential public intellectuals.
16. Evangelos Katsioulis
Evangelos Katsioulis has an unmatched intelligence; it is estimated, by only 1 in every 300 million people. He has an IQ of 198. Evangelos is one of the smartest people in the world alive.
17. Donald Knuth
Knuth is an influential commuter scientist and mathematician. He is considered the father of algorithmic analysis.
18. James Woods
Woods has worked in many Hollywood films. Besides being an actor, Woods is also a graduate student of political science at MIT.
19. Mislav Predavec
Mislav Predavec is a Croatian mathematician. He has an enormous IQ of 190 and cites solving difficult intelligence tests as his favorite hobby.
20. Marilyn Vos Savant
Marilyn Vos Savant was described in The Guinness Book of World Records as the person having the highest recorded IQ score in 1986.
21. Paul Allen
Allen co-founded Microsoft but resigned from his post after suffering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In 2003, he founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
22. Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov is a legendary chess player who used to privately coach Magnus Carlsen, another renowned chess player.
23. Christopher Langan
Langan taught himself reading when he was just 4 years old. He dropped out of college but became an autodidact and developed his famous theory of the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe.
24. Richard Rosner
Rosner has done a great variety of jobs in his life. Before writing scripts for shows like Jimmy Kimmel, he had worked as a doorman, stripper, waiter, and a male model. He possesses an IQ of 190.
25. Kim Ung-Yong
Kim Ung-Yong started his university education when he was just 3 years old. He is a South Koran civil engineer who finished his Ph.D. by the time he was 16. He has an IQ of 210.
26. Christopher Hirata
Hirata is the youngest U.S. citizen to receive an International Physics Olympiad gold medal. He won the gold medal when he was just 13-year-old. His IQ is 225. He is one of the smartest person in the world.
27. Terence Tao
Terence Tao is one of the smartest people in the world often described as the ‘Mozart of Maths’. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degree at 16 and earned his Ph.D. at 20. He has an IQ of 230.
