I am not a fan of IQ. It plays a limited role though important. Most people with moderate IQs but through diligence and perseverance are able to achieve much. On top of that one has to be a decent person to earn my respect. Respect for parent, community, nation, human kind, animals are a must to earn my respect.
Still one name comes to our mind when the terms intelligence, high IQ are tossed at us. One person is singled out. Albert Einstein.
There is no doubt what Einstein achieved is remarkable. But is this his IQ or something else which led him to such greatness?
Let me take a few minutes to look at me. My test scores are remarkable. Though at IIT Bombay nobody looked at my scores and some thought I was dumb. My unable to speak fluent English and dark complexion perhaps led them to that thought. Perhaps some Brahmins thought how come a SC/ST person got admission to the extremely selective electrical engineering department, Quota and Reservation. And I let them have their way. If somebody tried to show off, and it was commonly done at IIT, though subtly, it was a popular sports in IIT. Some were extremely rich – for example there was a guy in my wing, people who went to his house mentioned that there were 40 plus rooms, and his family was mentioned as the one of the richest dynasties. and so on. Patni of Patni Computers was in my wing and we were not awed by him.
In that atmosphere I got hold of a book called Test your IQ. I tested myself. We had 30 minutes to solve them. There were 50 questions.I remember getting 45-46 answers correct. Didn’t try to ace them because I got bored. After 15 minutes or less quit them. 4 was 100 IQ, 10-15 was 180, and 45 was outside the curve. Similar happened to me when I took GMAT practice set. I thought GMAC is fooling the applicants. A test for humans can’t be so easy.
My the way my scores are:
GMAT: Quantitative: 56 (99%ile cut off was 46), Verbal :47 (99%9le)
In fact Mitsubishi took me to Japan to conduct an experiment on me – how fast can I learn Japanese. It was because of my high verbal ability. Memorization of Kanjis was the difficult part. I passed level 1 Japanese language proficiencyt est in 3 years and in 7 years I would have gotten higher than any Japanese. It’s an easy language, really.
Oh, back to Einstein. I have high respect for what he did achieve, but estimate of his IQ being about 120, does not intimidate me.
More on his later.