What Was Albert Einstein’s IQ?

The brilliant physicist was actually never tested, but

that hasn't stopped some from estimating how he
would have scored.

BY PATRICK J. KIGER , UPDATED: JUN 12, 2020 |

ORIGINAL: DEC 13, 2018

Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images

There is a long list of news headlines about

children in various countries who reportedly
have higher IQs than Albert Einstein, the
theoretical physicist whose ideas altered
humanity’s conception of reality and led to
numerous inventions, from television to lasers.

Scapă de gâtul uscat

There wasn't a proper test to

measure Einstein's IQ
The problem is, nobody really can say for sure
what Einstein’s IQ was. There’s no indication
that he ever was tested. Indeed, IQ testing
was still in its beginning stages in the early
1900s, when Einstein first emerged as a
scientific luminary. Since then, the tests have
evolved significantly. The maximum IQ score
assigned by the WAIS-IV, a commonly-used
test today, is 160. A score of 135 or above puts
a person in the 99th percentile of the
population. News articles often put Einstein’s
IQ at 160, though it’s unclear what that
estimate is based upon.

“If you google ‘Einstein's IQ’ you get plenty of

results, but nothing that I would consider
credible,” says Dean Keith Simonton, a
professor emeritus of psychology at the
University of California, Davis and author of
The Genius Checklist: Nine Paradoxical Tips
on How You Can Become a Creative Genius.

“One fundamental problem with the estimates

I've seen is that they tend to conflate
intellectual ability with domain-specific
achievement,” explains Simonton, who in 2006
published a study in the journal Political
Psychology in which he estimated the IQs of
42 U.S. Presidents. "Of course Einstein was
the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th
century, so he must have had a superlative
IQ."

But Simonton adds, “If you closely examined

Einstein's early intellectual development, his
IQ seems far less striking.”

Einstein's thought experiment

when he was a teenager
helped scientists determine his
IQ
Jonathan Wai, an assistant professor of
education policy and psychology at the
University of Arkansas who writes about the
study of intelligence for Psychology Today,
argues that Einstein might have scored high,
given the abilities he demonstrated in his work.
Wai points to Einstein’s famous
teenage thought experiment, in which he
visually imagined chasing after a light beam.
That, coupled with scientists’ finding in the
1990s that the part of Einstein’s brain that
processes three-dimensional visualization was
significantly larger than typical, “suggests that
Einstein was highly spatially talented,” Wai
explains.

Wai also says that Einstein’s choice of

scientific specialty, in itself, also indicates that
he would have had a high score. “People who
obtain PhDs in areas such as physics tend to
have extremely high IQs…a combination of
mathematical, verbal and spatial reasoning
ability,” Wai says. “This has been shown in a
stratified random sample of the population as
well as within a sample of gifted individuals
deliberately selected to be in the top one
percent of ability or IQ. What this suggests is
that if someone is a physicist, they are very
likely to be well above average in IQ relative to
the general population.”

Steve Jobs' IQ was on par with

Einstein's
That might have put Einstein at least on a par
with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Wai
has estimated that Jobs had a high IQ of 160,
based upon Jobs having once said that as a
fourth grader, he tested at a level equivalent to
a high school sophomore.

The idea of attempting to estimate the IQs of

long-dead intellectual giants isn’t a new one.
Back in 1926, researcher Catharine M. Cox
published estimates of the IQs of 301 historical
figures, including Charles Dickens, Galileo
Galilei and Ludwig van Beethoven based upon
accounts of their youthful traits and
achievements.

Some question whether there’s a need to

calculate Einstein’s IQ at all. “I don’t see the
value in this kind of exercise,” says Robert B.
McCall, a professor emeritus of psychology at
the University of Pittsburgh.

“Famous people are famous for their actions,

and we should celebrate those actions for the
most part. Further, many of their contributions
may only be modestly related to tested IQ. You
can be ‘smart’ or accomplished in many ways
that are only slightly related to IQ.”

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