Is this 11-year-old boy smarter than Stephen Hawking?
An 11-year-old boy in the U.K. has beat Stephen Hawking’s purported Mensa IQ test score.
Yusuf Shah, a student at Wigton Moor Primary School in Wigton Moor, Leeds, scored the highest possible Mensa test score for people under 18, automatically placing him in the top one percent of people with the highest IQ.
The 11-year-old boy scored a 162, which is higher than the 160 score that Hawking is said to have achieved. He is also believed to have a higher IQ than even Albert Einstein, who was estimated to have had an IQ of around 160, although he was never officially tested.
Shah said he decided to take the test after his friends lauded his intelligence.
“Everyone at school thinks I am very smart and I have always wanted to know if I was in the top twso percent of the people who take the test,” Shah reportedly said. “It feels special to have a certificate for me and about me.”
Shah, who lives with his brothers Zaki and Khalid, his mother Sana and father Irfan, celebrated his achievement with his family at a Nando’s chicken restaurant.
In the future, the boy hopes to study mathematics at Oxford or Cambridge. In the meantime, Shah enjoys playing sudoku and solving Rubik’s cubes when he is not studying.
“I was so proud. He is the first person to take the Mensa test in the family,” Sana said. “I was actually a little concerned too – he has always gone into a hall full of kids to take tests. We thought he might be intimidated by the adults at the center. But he did brilliantly.”
“It is a difficult test to prepare for,” Irfan said. “We just did what we were already doing – nothing specific for the IQ test. I still tell him that ‘your dad is still smarter than you’. … We take it all lightheartedly. Even if you are talented, you have to be the hardest worker.”
Shah’s 8-year-old brother also hopes to take the Mensa test when he is older.
Mensa is an association for people who score within the 98th percentile or higher on standardized IQ tests.
Featured Image via WION
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