March 5, 2013
A British schoolgirl of Indian origin has an IQ higher than Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Last summer Neha Ramu asked her parents if she could go to an academic camp in the United States to learn about the brain and the nervous system.
A 12-year-old girl has stunned her parents after she was revealed as having an IQ higher than Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
March 5, 2013
A British schoolgirl of Indian origin has an IQ higher than Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Last summer Neha Ramu asked her parents if she could go to an academic camp in the United States to learn about the brain and the nervous system.
A 12-year-old girl has stunned her parents after she was revealed as having an IQ higher than Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
Neha Ramu achieved a score of 162 on a Mensa IQ test – the highest score possible.
Despite her young age, the score puts her in the top one per cent of brightest people in the country and means she is more intelligent than Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and even Albert Einstein, who are all thought to have an IQ of 160.
Neha's doctor parents, who lived in India before moving to Britain when their daughter was seven, had no idea their daughter was so gifted.
Although she had always performed well at school, it was only when she took an entrance exam for Tiffin Girls', a high-achieving grammar school, and achieved a perfect score of 280/280 that they realized her capabilities.
Two years later, she took the test for Mensa, a society for people with high IQs, and achieved the maximum possible score for someone aged under 18.
Neha's mother Jayashree said: "At first I didn't really realize what she was capable of as she wasn't being stretched at school and when she joined primary school in the UK in year three we didn't really understand the system here.
"But then when she got the result of the entrance exam for Tiffin Girls', I thought 'OK, maybe she does have something special in her and I'm just not realizing it.
"We found out she'd got in yesterday evening when my husband and I were both at work. Neha came home before us and opened the letter because it was addressed to her. She was shouting down the phone: 'I got in, I got in'.
"I am so proud of her. Although she's being doing well at these kind of tests for sometime now this is just marvelous. I can't express the feeling."
Whilst most children spend their summer holidays playing in the park or on their computer, Neha, who is in year eight at Tiffin Girls' School in Kingston- upon- Thames, asked her parents last summer whether she could go to a three-week academic summer camp in America to learn about the brain and the body's nervous system.
Neha, who left her home in Surbiton and went to the camp alone, studied for seven hours a day, five days a week dissecting body parts such as the brain and eyes.
Both her mother and her father Muniraju are eye specialists and Neha already has plans to follow in their footsteps into a career in medicine. Before that, Neha has already set her sights on a place at Harvard after taking her SATs- the American equivalent of A-levels- and achieving a score of 740 out of 800 in a test designed for 18-year-olds.
The score would be sufficient to get her into any Ivy League university.
Despite her success Neha, a devoted Harry Potter fan and keen swimmer, said she found the Mensa test "quite hard" and did not expect to get in.
She said: "I'm really, really happy because I found the test quite hard and I wasn't really holding out much hope that I'd be a member of Mensa.
"We might have a little party or something sometime soon to celebrate. I haven't told my friends yet but I've told some of my family and they are all very happy for me."
Einstein never took an IQ test as none of the modern intelligence tests existed when he was alive, but experts believe he had an IQ of around 160.
The IQ test is designed to test a range of abilities to determine the intelligence level of the student. In the UK the average person achieves a score of 100.
A spokesman for British Mensa said: "Neha scored 162 on the Cattell IIIB test, putting her within the top one per cent of people in the country."
This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph
