"Stephen Hawking is charmingly evasive about his IQ. In 2004, he told the New York Times, 'I hope I’m near the upper end of the range.' Chances are he is. His IQ is almost certainly high enough to qualify him for Mensa, the biggest high-IQ society on Earth—1 in 50 people will meet its membership criteria. But would he qualify for the ultra-exclusive Pi Society, which takes only those with IQ’s in the top 99.999999 percentile? Many geniuses haven’t. Had they been given the chance, the top minds behind the founding of Mensa, or even the creation of IQ testing itself, might not have made the cut. " - Lit

"The idea of measuring brainpower began in the late 1800’s with Sir Francis Galton, a privileged Victorian-era Englishman who had more than enough brains of his own to measure. He invented, among other things, fingerprint analysis, weather maps, the concept of mathematical correlation, the phrase “nature versus nurture,” and psychometry—the measuring of intellect. The idea came to him after reading his half-cousin Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Determined to quantify the (to him) obvious differences between upper- and the lower-class brains, he threw himself into the study of genetic superiority. He even gave it a name, “eugenics,” and psychometry grew out of it in the late 1800’s. The “science” of eugenics was eventually dismissed as racist baloney, but the notion of intelligence testing persisted. Psychologists and statisticians devised many ways to test smarts over the ensuing years. In the first years of the twentieth century, Frenchmen Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon created the first version of today’s stereotypical brainpower test: it measured one’s “mental age,” divided it by actual age, and multiplied the quotient by 100—giving an intelligence quotient, or IQ. Their system had problems. For example, the only limit to IQ was one’s age: a 20-year-old found to have the mental age of a 40-year-old (whatever that means) would have an IQ of 200. In theory, a 10-year-old found to have the mental age of an 80-year-old could have an IQ of 800. Such a system only works in a world where older is always smarter. To address this flaw, in 1939 American psychologist David Wechsler refined the method. He compared an individual’s performance to those of the general population, rather than to his or her own mental age. The deviation from average becomes the IQ. This system is the basis for most IQ tests today. “Average” is 100. It splits the population right down the middle: the odds a person will have an IQ of 100 or higher are 1 in 2." - Lit

"...Critics of IQ testing also point out that there are many ways to be intelligent. Artists, chess champions, philosophers, Olympic medalists, authors, physicists, trivia masters, and linguists are all intelligent in different ways, many of which appear nowhere on an IQ test. And according to Hawking, 'People who boast about their IQ’s are losers.'" - Lit