How smart are you? (Why
is our society so fascinated by this question?)
Who
has the highest IQ? - Marilyn Von Savant has a weekly
column "Ask Marilyn." She is listed in the Guinness Book of
World Records Hall of Fame for "Highest IQ."
How
did we get a single number to describe an individual's abilities? - For almost the last hundred
years society has measured smartness or intelligence by a number. In 1905,
a Frenchman named Alfred Binet was asked by the French government to develop
a test to perform this sorting and ranking task. Several years later,
Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford, translated and adapted the test
for use in the U.S. The test is now called the Revised Stanford-Binet
test.
