Einstein's IQ: Did Einstein Ever Take an IQ Test?

Einstein's life and the first intelligence tests

Einstein finished school before intelligence tests existed. The first intelligence scale, by Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, appeared in France in 1905 and was built to assess children. By then Einstein was 26 and earning his doctorate.

The Army testing was large: 1,726,966 men had been given a psychological examination before January 31, 1919, according to the Army's report published by the National Academy of Sciences. But it was an American military program, run while Einstein was a professor in Germany. There is no record that he ever took an intelligence test, then or later.

Where the number 160 comes from

Nobody seems to know. The psychologist Russell T. Warne searched published claims about Einstein's IQ in 2023 and found a long list of different numbers:

• The earliest he found from Einstein's lifetime was in LIFE magazine on November 12, 1945. An article about a 14-year-old Yale graduate, Merrill Kenneth Wolf, gave the boy's IQ as 182, "which is only 23 points lower than Einstein's," implying 205.
• In 1954, LIFE gave a different figure: 192.
• In 1962, Popular Mechanics wrote that "Einstein, who never took an intelligence test, was estimated to have an IQ of 207."
• In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers gave 150.

Warne found that 160 is the usual figure in the press today, but no one who gave it cited a source. He wrote that "there does not seem to be anything special about that number." His conclusion: "any currently existing claims of an IQ score for Albert Einstein are not credible." Numbers that range from 150 to 207 for the same person are a sign that none of them was measured.

Could anyone estimate it from his life?

There is a research method for estimating the IQ of historical figures from records of their childhood. Catharine Cox used it in a 1926 study of 301 eminent people. But her group was limited to "great men and women who lived between the years 1450 and 1850," so Einstein, born in 1879, is not in it. Warne notes that no one has applied the method to Einstein. Even if someone did, the result would be an estimate from biography, not a test score.

What an IQ of 160 would mean

On the modern IQ scale (average 100, standard deviation 15), the normal curve puts 160 at four standard deviations above average: higher than about 99.997% of people, or about 1 in 31,600. Scores that far out are hard to measure. On Pearson's WISC-V, a Wechsler test for children, the Full Scale IQ tops out at 160, and the Mensa Norway online test reports nothing above 145. The IQ scale page shows how rare each score is and explains why no IQ score is officially labeled "genius."

IQ also changed meaning during Einstein's life. Terman's 1916 intelligence quotient was "the ratio of mental age to chronological age," a measure built on how children's abilities grow with age. Modern scores are ranks against a reference group. So when a news story says a child has "a higher IQ than Einstein," it is comparing a real test score with a number nobody measured.

What you can measure

Einstein's IQ was never measured, but your own result on a reasoning test can be. Our test reports scores from 55 to 145 and compares you with other people who have taken it. To see what a score means, read what an average IQ is. If you are curious about the high-IQ society, see how the Mensa test works.