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Marilyn vos Savant (/ˌvɒs səˈvɑːnt/; born Marilyn Mach; August 11, 1946) is an American magazine columnist who has the highest recorded intelligence quotient (IQ) in the Guinness Book of Records, a competitive category the publication has since retired. Since 1986, she has written "Ask Marilyn", a Parade magazine Sunday column wherein she solves puzzles and answers questions on various subjects, and which popularized the Monty Hall problem in 1990.

Biography

Marilyn vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach[3] on August 11, 1946,[1] in St. Louis, Missouri, to parents Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant.[citation needed] Savant says one should keep premarital surnames, with sons taking their fathers' and daughters their mothers'.[4][5] The word savant, meaning someone of learning, appears twice in her family: her grandmother's name was Savant; her grandfather's, vos Savant. She is of Italian, Czechoslovak,[6] German,[7] and Austrian ancestry, being descended from the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.

As a teenager, Savant worked in her father's general store and wrote for local newspapers using pseudonyms. She married at 16 and divorced ten years later. Her second marriage ended when she was 35.

She went to Meramec Community College and studied philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis but quit two years later to help with a family investment business. Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue a career in writing. Before starting "Ask Marilyn", she wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which included intelligence quotient (IQ) quizzes and expositions on intelligence and its testing.

Savant married Robert Jarvik (one of the co-developers of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart) on August 23, 1987,[9][10] and was made Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart, Inc. She has served on the board of directors of the National Council on Economic Education, on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women's History Museum,[11] and as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.[12] Toastmasters International named her one of "Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999", and in 2003 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The College of New Jersey.

Rise to fame and IQ score

Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ" from 1985 to 1989[3] and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988.[3][13] Guinness retired the "Highest IQ" category in 1990 after concluding IQ tests were too unreliable to designate a single record holder.[3] The listing drew nationwide attention.

Guinness cited vos Savant's performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age ten.[7] She says her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score.[7] This figure was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records; it is also listed in her books' biographical sections and was given by her in interviews.

The second test reported by Guinness was Hoeflin's Mega Test, taken in the mid-1980s. The Mega Test yields IQ standard scores obtained by multiplying the subject's normalized z-score, or the rarity of the raw test score, by a constant standard deviation and adding the product to 100, with Savant's raw score reported by Hoeflin to be 46 out of a possible 48, with a 5.4 z-score, and a standard deviation of 16, arriving at a 186 IQ. The Mega Test has been criticized by professional psychologists as improperly designed and scored, "nothing short of number pulverization".

Savant sees IQ tests as measurements of a variety of mental abilities and thinks intelligence entails so many factors that "attempts to measure it are useless".[16] She has held memberships with the high-IQ societies Mensa International and the Mega Society.

"Ask Marilyn"

Following her listing in the 1986 Guinness Book of World Records, Parade ran a profile of her along with a selection of questions from Parade readers and her answers. Parade continued to get questions, so "Ask Marilyn" was made.

She uses her column to answer questions on many chiefly academic subjects; solve logical, mathematical or vocabulary puzzles posed by readers; answer requests for advice with logic; and give self-devised quizzes and puzzles. Aside from the weekly printed column, "Ask Marilyn" is a daily online column that adds to the printed version by resolving controversial answers, correcting mistakes, expanding answers, reposting previous answers, and solving additional questions.

Three of her books (Ask Marilyn, More Marilyn, and Of Course, I'm for Monogamy) are compilations of questions and answers from "Ask Marilyn". The Power of Logical Thinking includes many questions and answers from the column.

Fermat's Last Theorem

A few months after Andrew Wiles said he had proved Fermat's Last Theorem, Savant published the book The World's Most Famous Math Problem (October 1993),[29] which surveys the history of Fermat's Last Theorem as well as other mathematical problems. Reviewers questioned her criticism of Wiles' proof; asking whether it was based on a correct understanding of mathematical induction, proof by contradiction, and imaginary numbers.

Especially contested was Savant's statement that Wiles' proof should be rejected for its use of non-Euclidean geometry. Savant stated that because "the chain of proof is based in hyperbolic (Lobachevskian) geometry", and because squaring the circle is seen as a "famous impossibility" despite being possible in hyperbolic geometry, then "if we reject a hyperbolic method of squaring the circle, we should also reject a hyperbolic proof of Fermat's last theorem."

Specialists[who?] flagged discrepancies between the two cases, distinguishing the use of hyperbolic geometry as a tool for proving Fermat's Last Theorem from its use as a setting for squaring the circle: squaring the circle in hyperbolic geometry is a different problem from that of squaring it in Euclidean geometry, whereas Fermat's Last Theorem is not inherently geometry-specific. Savant was criticized for rejecting hyperbolic geometry as a satisfactory basis for Wiles' proof, with critics pointing out that axiomatic set theory (rather than Euclidean geometry) is now the accepted foundation of mathematical proofs and that set theory is sufficiently robust to encompass both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry as well as geometry and adding numbers.[citation needed]

Savant retracted the argument in a July 1995 addendum, saying she saw the theorem as "an intellectual challenge – 'to find another proof using only tools available to Fermat in the 17th century.'"

The book came with a glowing introduction by Martin Gardner, which had been based on an earlier draft of the book that did not contain any of the contentious views.

Courtesy – Wikipedia

- Marilyn Savant

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