Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made?

Re:Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made? by aswanson on Thursday June 26, 2008 @07:47PM (#229258)

I've never met a math/physics/eng faculty member with an IQ below 120 (though mine is below 100).

Yummy, you have to be kidding us. Either that, or you were drunk when you took the test, or we really need to rethink what the tests are measuring. There is no way somebody with subnormal intelligence is involved in exchanges like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216701

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Re:Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made? by DaniFong on Thursday June 26, 2008 @10:05PM (#229327)

Apparently someone decided the score a bunch of the Caltech faculty on an IQ test, and a surprising number of them turned up with scores < 100. This doesn't prove that the concept is untenable, but clearly some of our tests are missing things.

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Re:Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made? by rms on Thursday June 26, 2008 @10:10PM (#229333)

That's interesting... any source?

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Re:Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made? by DaniFong on Thursday June 26, 2008 @10:36PM (#229354)

I'm afraid not -- it was just an anecdote circulating around the astro department at Princeton. Feynman was known to have an IQ of 125, and I met a grad student there who admitted to an IQ of around 80 -- a perfectly bright person, to be sure. Again, I don't have the ability to prove these things to you, but I think we should recognize that, occasionally, our methods for measuring intelligence are very very broken.

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Re:Ask cperciva: Are great mathematicians born or made? by tigerthink on Monday July 14, 2008 @09:16PM (#246280)

>Feynman was known to have an IQ of 125

That's still more than 1.5 standard deviations above average. If Feynman's IQ was exactly 125, he would be ahead of "only" 95% of the population.

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