About the author
Fatima
Founder & Editor, IQXPuzzles · Builds the tools, checks the claims
I started IQXPuzzles after noticing the same thing you probably have: search any famous person’s IQ and you get a confident three-digit number with no source attached to it anywhere. Not a bad source. None at all. The same figures get copied from site to site until they sound like facts.
So this site does the boring part instead. Every number published here gets traced back toward wherever it actually came from. When there’s a real source, I name it. When there isn’t, I say so plainly rather than repeating the number and hoping nobody checks.
I also build the tools here myself — the Real IQ Test, the Twitter IQ Checker, and the username checker. That means the scoring method is mine to explain, and I explain it on every one of them.
I’m not a psychologist and I don’t claim to be. I have no clinical training and I can’t diagnose anything. What I do is read the primary sources, show the arithmetic, and mark my own tools clearly as screening tools for curiosity rather than assessments. Where a question needs a professional, the answer here is to see one.
How I decide what to publish
Four rules, applied to every article on the site.
Trace it, or say you couldn’t
Every figure gets followed back toward its first appearance in print. If the trail ends at a listicle quoting another listicle, that gets stated in the article. “No traceable source” is a finding, not a gap.
Show the arithmetic
Where a number comes from a calculation, the calculation goes in the article so you can check it yourself. If a conversion has a step missing, the missing step gets shown too.
Publish the inconvenient parts
If the evidence cuts against the flattering version, it goes in anyway. That’s why the Bill Gates article includes his Putnam result and the Elon Musk article includes the low-end estimates alongside the high ones.
Fix mistakes in public
Corrections get logged below with the date, not quietly edited out. If you find something wrong, tell me and it goes on the list.
Corrections I’ve made to widely repeated claims
These aren’t corrections to my own articles — they’re errors I found in the versions circulating everywhere else, and fixed before publishing. They’re the clearest illustration of what the process above actually produces.
| Common claim | What the source actually says |
|---|---|
| Cox’s 1926 study estimated Shakespeare’s IQ at 210 | Cox deliberately excluded Shakespeare — too little documented about his childhood to apply her method. The 210 comes from Tony Buzan’s 1994 book. |
| Newton’s IQ was 190 per Cox | Cox published two figures per person. Newton’s raw estimate was 130; 190 is after her upward correction, which she herself called a crude approximation. |
| Einstein couldn’t have taken an IQ test because none existed | The Army Alpha, the first widely used adult test, appeared in 1917 when Einstein was 38. Adult tests existed. He simply had no reason to sit one. |
| Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize for relativity | The 1921 prize was awarded for his work on the photoelectric effect. Relativity is his most famous work but isn’t what the citation names. |
| Bill Gates’ 1590 SAT means an IQ of 160 | That conversion skips regression to the mean. Correcting for it, using an SAT–IQ correlation of 0.70 to 0.80, gives roughly 142 to 148. |
| Mensa’s cutoff is 132 | Mensa admits at the 98th percentile. That’s 130 on a Wechsler scale, 132 on Stanford-Binet, and 148 on Cattell III-B — same percentile, three different numbers. |
Corrections to this site
The table above is other people’s errors, caught before publishing. This one is mine, caught after — and it is separate on purpose, because a site that only ever lists other people’s mistakes is not really being accountable.
When a reader points out something wrong here and it holds up, the fix goes in and the correction is logged below with the date, what was wrong, and what the source actually says. Corrections are not quietly edited out. If you send one and would rather not be named, say so and you won’t be — the correction still gets made either way.
Correction log
No corrections yet. This entry will be replaced by the first one, and the list will grow from there.
Found something wrong? Send it here — it is the most useful message this site receives.
What I’ve built here
Why the site takes this angle
There’s a version of this niche that’s easy to write: pick a famous name, quote whatever number is trending, add a photo, move on. It ranks for a while. It also tells the reader nothing they can rely on.
The harder version is more interesting anyway. The story of where “160” attached itself to Einstein — drifting from 205 in 1945 to 192 in 1954 to 207 in 1962 and finally down to 160 today — is genuinely better than any single number could be. So is the fact that Bill Gates solved an open combinatorics problem at 22 and held the record for thirty years, which almost nobody writing about his IQ ever mentions.
Those are the things worth publishing. The numbers are mostly just the hook that gets people in the door.
Get in touch
Found an error, have a source I’ve missed, or want to suggest a claim worth checking? I read everything.
Page last updated: August 2026