Please welcome Marilyn Mach vos Savant, ladies and gentlemen Despite being the person with the highest IQ ever recorded - a staggering 228 - Marilyn vos Savant's early years were remarkably unassuming.
No one really paid much attention to me, actually. Mostly because I was a girl, and I accepted that. She came from a humble background.
One of her grandfathers was killed in the coal mines. The other was injured so badly, he had to walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
Her parents, from Germany and Italy, sought the American dream in St. Louis, Missouri, where Marilyn was born on August 11, 1946.
When Marilyn was 10, she took the Stanford-Benet intelligence test, which showed she had the intelligence of a 22-year-old.
Since the formula for calculating IQ divides the person's mental age by their actual age, multiplied by 100, Marilyn's yielded an IQ of 228.
Marilyn's IQ exceeds Albert Einstein's estimated 160-200. Mathematician Terence Tao reportedly has a similar IQ range of 225-230.
Child prodigy William James Sidis may have surpassed Marilyn with an estimated IQ of 250-300.
You might expect someone of such extraordinary intellect to attend an Ivy League school, yet Marilyn chose a different path.
She went to a community college and later left Washington University in St. Louis before leaving to manage her family's investment business.
