[tokenadult]

The research conclusion is actually more general than what Buffett reports. An IQ level of about 120 is sufficient for eminence in any field, enough IQ to be a "genius" by making a path-breaking contribution to some field of creative work.

AFTER EDIT: Dean Keith Simonton's several writings on "genius" in a wide variety of domains provides the citations to other authors for that IQ figure.

[ekm2]

Some fields have a cognitive threshold. I seriously doubt if an IQ of 120 is sufficient to become an eminent mathematician.

[tokenadult]

I seriously doubt if an IQ of 120 is sufficient to become an eminent mathematician.

That is an empirical question, and the historical answer is that that IQ level suffices.

[clarkm]

Not true - there are tons of studies that show otherwise, so I have no idea how this myth still exists.

An IQ of 120 is the top ~10%. Here's a 25 year longitudinal study [1] of over 1,500 students that were all in the top 1% and it shows significant differences between the lowest and the highest quartile (who were in the top .01%):

> Ability Differences Among People Who Have Commensurate Degrees Matter for Scientific Creativity > ABSTRACT: A sample of 1,586 intellectually talented adolescents (top 1%) were assessed on the math portion of the SAT by age 13 and tracked for more than 25 years. Patents and scientific publications were used as criteria for scientific and technological accomplishment. Participants were categorized according to whether their terminal degree was a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate degree, and within these degree groupings, the proportion of participants with at least one patent or scientific publication in adulthood increased as a function of this early SAT assessment. Information about individual differences in cognitive ability (even when measured in early adolescence) can predict differential creative potential in science and technology within populations that have advanced educational degrees.

This is just one example, but the results seem to be pretty consistent.

[1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/ParkPsychScienc...

[tokenadult]

I know David Lubinski, one of the investigators in that correlational study, reasonably well. (He and I are alumni of the same school district and same undergraduate university, and have many mutual friends besides meeting each other in conferences from time to time.) It's important to distinguish the claim about the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (of whom my son is one participant) and my claim about mathematical "genius" in general. The claim you cite is that frequency of eminent accomplishment in that study population increases as SAT scores at age twelve increase. That may be. My claim is that the threshold IQ score for eminent accomplishment in mathematics and other domains that recognize "genius" is no higher than 120, and I have Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck and the Terman longitudinal study on my side as I make that claim.

[clarkm]

My understanding was that many of the claims of threshold effects at least partially stemmed from the imprecision of many tests, even at the 1.5-2 sigma levels.

Would you be able to send me some more info? Email's in my profile.

[thewarrior]

Could you please lead me to the sources .Its just to console and motivate myself . Because I find this very hard to believe .

[btilly]

According to page 8 of http://mathdl.maa.org/images/upload_library/22/Polya/0746834... the noted mathematician http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Robinson had a measured IQ of 98.

He was in a different field, but Richard Feynman's mathematical genius is in dispute by nobody. However his measured IQ is widely quoted at 125.

IQ is somewhat correlated with intelligence, which is somewhat correlated with mathematical ability. You cannot be a mathematician without the mathematical ability. But your ability may or may not get fully reflected on an IQ test.

[Kudzu_Bob]

Physicist Steve Hsu on Feynman's alleged 125 IQ score:

"Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics for an undergraduate-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-it also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstei...

[btilly]

There is no surprise here. As http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.htm... makes clear, we consider someone "intelligent" because they possess many abilities of interest. But the possession of one ability (eg mathematical reasoning) is not well correlated with the possession of another (eg verbal ability). Unless you possess all of those, you won't score at the top in IQ.

But to excel in any specific field does NOT so much require top mental abilities of all kinds as exceptional ones required by that field. Not having a decent baseline of all abilities will be a handicap - you need that - but a Richard Feynman does not need to be a genius grammatically.

IQ tests are a very limited tool. They test a breadth of abilities and can indicate that you can do reasonably well at many things. (Indeed for a wide range of jobs, an IQ test is a better predictor of performance than your performance on the job interview!) However they can't recognize that you're truly exceptional at any particular thing.

[tokenadult]

Steve Hsu and his comments on IQ embarrass the actual research psychologists I know. Just in the last week a psychologist sent me a link to a take-down of Hsu's latest project.

http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-geneti...

The psychologist who sent me the link, and another psychologist colleague of his who was copied on the same email, are both experienced and astute human behavior geneticists (the other recipient was a math major as an undergraduate who became a psychology research after a mathematical career) and they don't agree with Hsu's conclusions about current data.