Myths and famous claims
What was Stephen Hawking's IQ?
What is documented
Stephen Hawking’s IQ is not known. Asked about it in a 2004 New York Times Magazine interview, he said he had no idea, and added that people who boast about their IQ are losers. No test score for him has been published, so any number you see online is a guess.
Want your own number? The test is 25 visual puzzles, about 12 minutes, no sign-up.
What Hawking said
The most reliable statement about Stephen Hawking's IQ comes from Hawking. In a 2004 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon asked him his IQ. He said he had no idea, and that people who boast about their IQ are losers (Solomon, NYT Magazine 2004). In the same interview he said there is a continuous range of ability, with no clear line that marks a genius.
That answer settles the factual question. If Hawking did not know a score for himself, a website that prints one is not reporting a measurement.
What is documented: his life and work
Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, and died on March 14, 2018, in Cambridge (Britannica, Stephen Hawking). He studied physics at University College, Oxford (B.A., 1962) and earned his Ph.D. at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1966 (Britannica, Stephen Hawking). Soon after his 21st birthday, tests showed he had motor neurone disease (ALS), and he was given only two years to live (hawking.org.uk biography).
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1974 | Proposed that black holes emit particles until they exhaust their energy (“Black hole explosions?”, Nature) (hawking.org.uk biography) |
| 1974 | Elected one of the Royal Society's youngest fellows (Britannica, Stephen Hawking) |
| 1979 to 2009 | Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a chair Isaac Newton once held (hawking.org.uk biography) |
| 1988 | Published A Brief History of Time (Britannica, Stephen Hawking) |
| 2006 | Copley Medal of the Royal Society (Britannica, Stephen Hawking) |
| 2009 | U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (Britannica, Stephen Hawking) |
| 2013 | Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of Hawking radiation (hawking.org.uk biography) |
A Brief History of Time spent a record 4.5 years on the UK bestseller list, was translated into over 40 languages and sold over 20 million copies (hawking.org.uk biography). He never won a Nobel Prize; his official biography says the lack of experimental confirmation of Hawking radiation kept him from it (hawking.org.uk biography).
That record is the real evidence of his ability, and it is far more informative than any single test number could be. It also shows why a guessed IQ adds nothing: no score would tell you more about his thinking than the work itself. If you want to see the same pattern with a documented school score, read Richard Feynman's IQ.
Try one · Spatial Reasoning
Which option is the same shape, only rotated?
Tap the option you think is right, or show the answer.
Show the answer
Option 2 is the original figure turned a quarter turn clockwise.
How to solve it
- Pick a landmark: the marked cell or the end of the longest arm.
- Turn the figure in your head and watch where that landmark goes, and which side the other cells end up on.
- Turning the figure a quarter turn clockwise gives option 2.
- Each of the other options is a mirror image: flipping it over would match, but no turn does.
That was 1 puzzle. The full test has 25.
Why a number circulates anyway
Famous scientists attract IQ numbers whether or not a test exists. The best documented example is Albert Einstein: published claims for him range from 150 to 207, and psychologist Russell Warne found no scholarly basis for any of them (Warne 2023). Hawking is often compared with Einstein, and numbers tend to travel with the comparison. When a figure has no named test, no date and no primary source, the most likely explanation is that it was copied from another page. The Einstein page traces that pattern in detail.
What a high score would and would not tell you
On a modern scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, about 99.7% of people score between 55 and 145 (the 68-95-99.7 rule). A score of 160 is higher than about 99.997% of people, roughly 1 in 32,000 (see IQ 160). Those are facts about the curve. They do not tell you who did great physics.
The research on high ability points the same way Hawking did. Lewis Terman followed 1,528 children with IQs of 135 or above, starting in 1921. None of them won a Nobel Prize, while William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, who were tested as children and did not qualify, both later won the Nobel Prize in Physics (Kell & Wai 2018) (NobelPrize.org 1956) (NobelPrize.org 1968). Terman concluded that the link between intelligence and achievement is far from perfect. Catharine Cox, studying historical figures in 1926, concluded that high but not the highest intelligence, combined with great persistence, achieves more eminence than the highest intelligence with less persistence (Cox 1926).
Scores are relative, not labels
Hawking's point about a continuous range matches how IQ is built. A deviation IQ places a person among others the same age, and the cutoffs people call "genius" are conventions, not natural boundaries. The page on what IQ is considered genius covers where those labels come from.
How to judge a famous IQ claim
- Does the claim name a specific test, a date and an age at testing?
- Did the person ever report a score themselves? Hawking said he did not know his.
- Is the source primary, such as an interview, a biography or a study, or another list of famous IQs?
- Do independent sources agree on the number?
- If it is an estimate, does it say who made it and how?
For other well-known cases, read about Richard Feynman's reported score and how historical estimates were made.
Sources
- Solomon, D. (2004, December 12). The Science of Second-Guessing: Questions for Stephen Hawking. The New York Times Magazine (read via Wayback Machine) www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/the-science-of-secondguessing.html
- Warne, R. T. (2023, September 14). The search for Albert Einstein's IQ. russellwarne.com (blog of a research psychologist) russellwarne.com/2023/09/14/the-search-for-albert-einsteins-iq/
- Kell, H. J., & Wai, J. (2018). Terman Study of the Gifted. In B. B. Frey (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation (pp. 1665-1667). SAGE. doi:10.4135/9781506326139.n691 doi.org/10.4135/9781506326139.n691
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 1956. NobelPrize.org www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1956/summary/
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 1968. NobelPrize.org www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1968/summary/
- Cox, C. M. (1926). Genetic Studies of Genius, Vol. II: The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses. Stanford University Press (scan of original) gwern.net/doc/iq/high/1926-cox-theearlymentaltraitsof300geniuses.pdf
- 68-95-99.7 rule. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Stephen Hawking, revised by Tracy Grant (Wayback Machine copy, 2025) web.archive.org/web/2025/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Hawking
- Stephen Hawking official website, Biography, accessed 2026-10-21 www.hawking.org.uk/biography