Marilyn vos Savant

She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age 10.

Marilyn vos Savant (born Marilyn Mach; August 11, 1946) is an American magazine columnist who has the highest recorded intelligence quotient (IQ) in the Guinness Book of Records, a competitive category the publication has since retired.

Marilyn vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach on August 11, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri, to parents Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant.

Savant says one should keep premarital surnames, with sons taking their fathers' and daughters their mothers'.

The word savant, meaning someone of learning, appears twice in her family: her grandmother's name was Savant; her grandfather's, vos Savant.

She is of Italian, Czechoslovak, German, and Austrian ancestry, being descended from the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.

As a teenager Savant worked in her father's general store and wrote for local newspapers using pseudonyms.

She married at 16 and divorced 10 years later.

Her second marriage ended when she was 35.

She went to Meramec Community College and studied philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis but quit two years later to help with a family investment business.

She says her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score.

This figure was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records; it is also listed in her books' biographical sections and was given by her in interviews.

Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue a career in writing.

Before starting "Ask Marilyn", she wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which included intelligence quotient (IQ) quizzes and expositions on intelligence and its testing.

The second test reported by Guinness was Hoeflin's Mega Test, taken in the mid-1980s.

The Mega Test yields IQ standard scores obtained by multiplying the subject's normalized z-score, or the rarity of the raw test score, by a constant standard deviation and adding the product to 100, with Savant's raw score reported by Hoeflin to be 46 out of a possible 48, with a 5.4 z-score, and a standard deviation of 16, arriving at a 186 IQ.

The Mega Test has been criticized by professional psychologists as improperly designed and scored, "nothing short of number pulverization".

Savant sees IQ tests as measurements of a variety of mental abilities and thinks intelligence entails so many factors that "attempts to measure it are useless".

She has held memberships with the high-IQ societies Mensa International and the Mega Society.

Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ" from 1985 to 1989 and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988.

Since 1986, she has written "Ask Marilyn", a Parade magazine Sunday column wherein she solves puzzles and answers questions on various subjects, and which popularized the Monty Hall problem in 1990.

Following her listing in the 1986 Guinness Book of World Records, Parade ran a profile of her along with a selection of questions from Parade readers and her answers.

Parade continued to get questions, so "Ask Marilyn" was made.

She uses her column to answer questions on many chiefly academic subjects; solve logical, mathematical or vocabulary puzzles posed by readers; answer requests for advice with logic; and give self-devised quizzes and puzzles.

Aside from the weekly printed column, "Ask Marilyn" is a daily online column that adds to the printed version by resolving controversial answers, correcting mistakes, expanding answers, reposting previous answers, and solving additional questions.

No new columns have been published online since October 30, 2022.

Three of her books (Ask Marilyn, More Marilyn, and Of Course, I'm for Monogamy) are compilations of questions and answers from "Ask Marilyn".

The Power of Logical Thinking includes many questions and answers from the column.

Savant married Robert Jarvik (one of the co-developers of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart) on August 23, 1987, and was made Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart, Inc. She has served on the board of directors of the National Council on Economic Education, on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women's History Museum, and as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Guinness retired the "Highest IQ" category in 1990 after concluding IQ tests were too unreliable to designate a single record holder.

The listing drew nationwide attention.

Guinness cited vos Savant's performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test.

Savant was asked the following question in her September 9, 1990, column:

"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you, 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?"

This question is called the Monty Hall problem due to its resembling scenarios on the game show Let's Make a Deal; its answer existed before it was used in "Ask Marilyn".

She said the selection should be switched to door #2 because it has a 2⁄3 probability of success, while door #1 has just 1⁄3.

To summarize, 2⁄3 of the time the opened door #3 will indicate the location of the door with the car (the door you had not picked and the one not opened by the host).

Only 1⁄3 of the time will the opened door #3 mislead you into changing from the winning door to a losing door.

These probabilities assume you change your choice each time door #3 is opened, and that the host always opens a door with a goat.

Toastmasters International named her one of "Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999", and in 2003 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The College of New Jersey.