The Genius Index 2026: what 31,898 biographies reveal about when, where and how genius happens

Geniuses are 30% more likely to be born in October than in June

Take the 28,150 people with a day-precise birth date. If birth month were irrelevant, each month would hold about 2,346 of them. October holds 2,797 — 19% above expectation. June holds 2,149, 8% below it. Autumn (September–November) accounts for 27.3% of all births in the corpus; spring (March–May) for 24.2%.

People whose only recorded birth date is a bare year (1 January placeholder) are excluded. Browse the birthday calendar to see who shares your day.

Scorpio leads the zodiac; Capricorn trails by 30%

Zodiac sign is a calendar label, so it inherits the October effect: Scorpio (October 23 – November 21) tops the table with 2,660 people, Libra and Virgo follow, and Capricorn — the dead of winter — is last with 2,049. Nothing here is astrology; it is the same autumn tilt read through a different calendar.

Every sign has its own page — Scorpio geniuses, Capricorn geniuses — with the full list of people born under it.

Explorers die ten years before filmmakers; scientists outlive politicians by five

For the 17,238 people with both a birth and a death year (lives of 15 to 110 years), mean lifespan by field runs from 75.0 years in film down to 65.0 for explorers. Science (73.8) and mathematics (73.5) sit near the top; politics (68.7) and sport (68.2) near the bottom.

And genius has gained seventeen years since the 1500s

Mean lifespan of documented people by birth century, for completed lives only (born no later than 1940):

Survivorship bias applies: a person enters the historical record more easily if they lived long enough to build a body of work. Compare individual lives with the head-to-head engine.

Women's share of documented genius has risen five-fold — to 18%

Among people born in the 1500s, 3.6% in the corpus are women. For those born in the 1800s the share is 9.7%; for the 1900s, 18.1%; for the still-small 2000s cohort, 19.6%. The record is catching up with reality, slowly — and the gap it still shows is itself the finding.

Six in ten child prodigies come from sport and music

Of 1,681 people flagged as child prodigies — a documented first major achievement before adulthood — 611 are athletes and 419 musicians: 61% between them. Science (152) and mathematics (130) together supply 17%. Philosophy, the field that most rewards a long life, produces almost none (13).

Meet them on the child prodigies hub, or test yourself against them in the daily challenge.

Four countries hold half of all Nobel laureates on record

The corpus records 528 Nobel laureates. The United States (132), Germany (59), the United Kingdom (47) and France (35) account for 273 of them — 52%. Country is the recorded birth country, not citizenship at the time of the award, which is why Germany counts several laureates who later worked in the United States.

Country pages: United States · Germany · United Kingdom · France.

What the database actually contains

Sport is the largest single field (3,859 people), ahead of politics, music and film. More than half of everyone documented was born in the twentieth century. Both facts say as much about how the modern record is written as about genius itself.

Born by century: before 1000 — 452 · 1000s–1400s — 851 · 1500s — 714 · 1600s — 845 · 1700s — 2,084 · 1800s — 7,923 · 1900s — 17,593 · 2000s — 382.

How this was built — and what it cannot tell you

Every figure on this page is a count over the live Geniuses.Club database as of September 9, 2026: 31,899 records, one fictional character removed. Birth and death dates, fields, countries and flags (woman, child prodigy, Nobel laureate) come from the structured record of each person, built from Wikidata and Wikipedia and reviewed by our editors. No figure is modelled, weighted or imputed.

Caveats we insist on. This is a corpus, not a census: it over-represents people with English-language documentation and the countries our editors have covered most deeply, so raw country counts are not per-capita rankings. Lifespan averages include only completed lives with both dates. “Child prodigy” means a documented major achievement before age 18. Zodiac is computed from the recorded birth date. We publish the aggregates so anyone can check them; we do not publish IQ scores as measured facts, because for almost everyone here none exists.

Cite, embed, republish

The findings and charts are free to use under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Geniuses.Club Editorial Team, “The Genius Index 2026”, geniuses.club/studies/genius-index-2026, September 2026. To embed a finding, copy this line:

<a href="https://geniuses.club/studies/genius-index-2026">Geniuses are 30% more likely to be born in October than June — The Genius Index 2026, Geniuses.Club</a>

Put the geniuses born today on your site

One line, no account, updates itself every day, five portraits with links. Free for any site or classroom:

<script src="https://geniuses.club/embed/born-today.js" async></script>

Journalists and researchers: the aggregate tables above are the dataset; the per-person records are the 31,898 public pages linked throughout the site, each with its sources.