Marilyn Vos Savant: The Woman With The Highest IQ

Today we are going to talk about Marilyn fox Savant. Intelligence is defined in different ways. That said, however, there seems to be a general consensus that intelligence is the ability to understand, process, produce and use information to solve problems.

People also usually assume that Albert Einstein is the most intelligent person to ever walk this earth. However, you may be surprised to learn that this is not the case.

There are a few brilliant minds that surpass his intelligence. Today we focus on worst one of them, which is Marilyn vos Savant, the woman with the highest IQ.

Marilyn vos Savant was classified as the most intelligent person in the world. So you could assume she’s a brilliant scientist. You would be wrong again. So keep reading to learn more about this incredible woman.

Who is Marilyn Fox Savant?

Marilyn vos Savant was born on August 11, 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother was Italian and her father a German descendant of scientist Ernst Mach who made important discoveries in the fields of optics, acoustics and thermodynamics.

However, her peers excluded her in high school and her teachers believed that as a woman she was a waste of intelligence.

After graduating from high school, she decided to study philosophy at the University of Washington. However, two years after college, her parents forced her to drop out of school to work in the family’s laundromat. As soon as she was financially independent, she started her career as a writer.

Her second marriage was to Dr. Robert Jarvik, a pioneer of the artificial heart ‘Jarvik-7’. Marilyn took care of her husband’s finances and worked as his assistant in cardiovascular disease research and prevention.

She also worked at the National Women’s History Museum, which won her the Women Who Make History award for her work fighting stereotypes of women.

Her intelligence was put to the test

When fox Savant was a child, she took several IQ tests. At the age of seven she already scored 127. Three years later she scored a whopping 167. Her highest score on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale was 228 points. Thanks to that score, the Guinness Book of Records subsequently named her the person with the highest IQ in the world.

After that, the media began to take an interest in her story. The magazine Parade published a first article with a question and answer section.

The popularity of that article inspired the “Ask Marilyn” column, where she answered questions about math, logic, philosophy, politics, and other more “ordinary” topics.

Her work on the column led her to write three books, namely: Ask Marilyn: Answers to America’s Most Frequently Asked Questions (1992), More Marilyn: Some Like it Bright (1994) and Of Course I’m for Monogamy: I’ m Also for Everlasting Peace and an End to Taxes (1996).

Marilyn solves the Monty Hall problem

In 1990 Marilyn received a letter from Craig F. Whitaker with the following problem statement:

Suppose you are on a game show and you are given a choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the other doors are goats.

You choose a door, say #1, for example, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door first, say. No. 3, with a goat behind it. He says to you, “Don’t you want to choose door no. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of door?

Marilyn responded with: “yes, you have to switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance.” However, she had no idea what kind of reaction she would get to her (correct) answer.

After she published her solution, Parade magazine began receiving thousands of letters from people who were outraged by her response. Here are some of the responses:

You blew it, you’re completely wrong! Since it seems that you find it difficult to understand what principle applies here, let me explain. After the host revealed a goat, you now have a one in two chance of being right.

Whether you change your roster or not, the odds are the same. There is enough math illiteracy in this country and we don’t need the nation’s highest IQ shouting it from the rooftops too. Shame on you! – Scott Smith, Ph.D. University of Florida –

Perhaps women look at math problems differently than men. – Don Edwards, Sunriver, Oregon –

The solution

Despite the mounting pressure, fox Savant refused to change her answer. She then devoted four columns to the Monty Hall problem to explain how she came to the solution.

In the second column, she proposed a method to clarify the probabilities. It came down to explaining the possible outcomes of the game in the following way:

Here you can see that if you switch doors, the probability of owning a car is 2/3. If you don’t switch, the chance is only 1/3.

In the third column she then explained the table and the probabilities. In the fourth, she revealed that many of her readers had tackled the Monty Hall problem and now supported her solution. Even the great mathematician Paul Erdos had to ask her forgiveness after he claimed she had solved the problem incorrectly.

The Humility of Marilyn Fox Savant

One of the things that bothered readers so much wasn’t that the solution was an attack on “common sense,” but that the person who solved it in public was a woman. Many mathematicians and universities had looked at the problem and had come up with the wrong answer.

So she faced this kind of discrimination again and had to deal with it simply because she was a woman. There were (and unfortunately still are) enough people who believe that intelligence is a serious man’s business.

Despite being one of the most brilliant minds in the world, Marilyn vos Savant is humble. She admits that she is not a great mathematician, nor does she have a photographic memory.

Her strengths, she says, are objective analysis, decision making, and problem solving. She also believes that intelligent people are often not good at that sort of thing. They often have a lot of training in a specific field and area of ​​knowledge.