What was Albert Einstein’s IQ?

There is a long list 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.

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.

“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 If you closely examined Einstein's early intellectual development, his IQ seems far less striking.