One thing that should be remembered is that IQ only measures the the intellectual capacity to interperet patterns at its broadest scope. If you can recognize patterns effectively, you should therefore be able to possess an above average IQ.
For example, my oldest son is 16 years old. He tested at a 161 IQ at age 8, a 174 at age 12 and currently has tested at a 186 IQ. This would likely qualify him for candidacy in MENSA or another intellectual society in most respects with one small caveat:
My son has Autism and cannot do simple things like tie shoes or dress himself yet he is only 4 points below Garry Kasparov in terms of IQ.
Just a thought.
And on this list they have Kasparov at 190:
http://mostextreme.org/highest_iq.php
Here is a list of individuals with the highest IQ as well as other popular prodigies:
NameScoreDetailsAbdesselam Jelloul 198 Scored in a 2012 test including 13 dimensions of intelligence. William J. Sidis 197 Child prodigy with exceptional mathematical & linguistic abilities. Christopher Langan 195 Called "the smartest man in America". Garry Kasparov 190 Chess grandmaster, writer and political activist. Leonardo da Vinci ~190 A genius polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, scientist... Ludwig Wittgenstein 190 Philosopher primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics... Sir Isaac Newton ~190 Physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist... Bobby Fischer 187 A chess Grandmaster and a child prodigy. Marilyn vos Savant 185 Magazine columnist, author, lecturer, and playwright. Kim Ung-Yong 170 Korean civil engineer and former child prodigy. Albert Einstein 160 Theoretical physicist (the general theory of relativity). Akrit Jaswal 146 Child prodigy who performed his first surgery at the age of 7. Grigori Y. Perelman ?Solved the Poincaré conjecture.
This list is bogus. Many of the people on the list died long before standardized i.q. tests were INVENTED! Those must be estimates or educated guesses. The i.q. test was invented around 1905. Da Vinci DIED in 1519 and Newton in 1727!
People (and this list) keep saying that G.K.'s i.q. measured 190 but according to this source, "in 1987-88, the German magazine Der Spiegel went to considerable effort and expense to find out Kasparov's IQ. Under the supervision of an international team of psychologists, Kasparov was given a large battery of tests designed to measure his memory, spatial ability, and abstract reasoning. They measured his IQ as 135 and his memory as one of the very best." So I was wrong when I said Russians, it was a German magazine hiring an 'international team of psychologists'.
Regarding, childhood i.q. vs adult i.q., wikipedia says, " To convert a child's IQ score into an adult score the following calculation should be made: child IQ score/100*age/16*100 = adult IQ score. The number 16 is used to indicate the age at which supposedly the IQ reaches its peak.[40]
For decades, practitioners' handbooks and textbooks on IQ testing have reported IQ declines with age after the beginning of adulthood."
Those are the sources I come up with in a 10 minute google search. To the couple of people who want me to name names and supply sources and conduct scientific studies, that's all the time I have for this. We are chess players pontificating elite player's i.q.'s not scientists conducting research nor journalists.
It should be obvious that if a child is extraordinarily precocious, a 'child prodigy' they might score higher on a test relative to their age piers they might not score so much higher later when the others catch up. I'm sure Fischer was high i.q. but not 180 or 187. He was gullible with religion, with conspiracy theories, and in 60 years never figured out how not to piss people off and get along with others. He was a child prodigy, a chess savant but not a universal genius.
That's my 2 cents, as in, my opinion. I could be wrong.
in my view you are giving false impressions. how you are presenting the research gives the casual reader the impression that someone's intelligence or iq peaks when they are a child or a teenager and then suddenly preciptiously falls off as they enter adulthood. I just don't think this is exactly true. I don't think iq begins to significantly decline until maybe age 40-50 and even there it's not all that much. maybe a 1-3 percent change, but of course this amount of change is viewed as significant by researchers and scientists. the very large declines occur much later as the person approaches their 70s and beyond.
I think it likely if someone took the sat or something when they were 17, then took it again when they were 36, they would score within 50 points above or below their original score. there really wouldn't be much difference. changes of 100 points or more would be exceedingly rare to put it mildly.
just think about all the professors/researchers in various colleges and universities who are age 40 and above. if iq or intelligence declined all that much by that age, wouldn't colleges and universities do away with these people? I mean the academic reputation of their institution would potentially be at stake.
1) I'm not misrepresenting the research or anything else. 2) I never said i.q. drops with age. What I said was that children's i.q.'s are figured differently than adults...the formula includes a division for age. If someone is an early developer they might score higher than a late developer relative to their peers and later their adult i.q.s might be closer. When that formula was worked out it was using averages for ages. But there can be extremes withing a group. If Fischer was an early developer and scored 180 on an i.q. test (where age is factored into the equation for coming up with the score), he might later score 150 on the same test, getting the same answers correct but without the age being factored in. Same test, same answers, same number correct, didn't lose intelligence, was scored differently. You're conflating scores with actual 'g' factor or i.q.