Isaac Asimov's IQ: The 160 He Reported, and What It Meant

The score he reported

Isaac Asimov did something rare among famous minds: he wrote down his own number. His essay "What Is Intelligence, Anyway?", still reprinted in college writing anthologies, opens with it. In the Army, he wrote, he took "the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160."

The fuss was brief. "No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that," he wrote, and for two hours the staff made much of him. The next day he was still a buck private, with kitchen police as his highest duty.

Asimov was conscripted in September 1945 and honorably discharged on July 26, 1946. Biographical notes on his life record the contrast of that year: the worst score in his company on the physical-conditioning test, the highest on the intelligence test.

What 160 meant in 1945

An Army score of 160 is not an IQ of 160 on a modern test. Asimov did not name the instrument. The Army's standard classification test of the period was the Army General Classification Test, built at the start of the Second World War to sort incoming servicemen; by the war's end more than 12 million men and women had taken it. It was designed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 20.

On that scale, 160 sits exactly three standard deviations above the mean. Modern IQ tests use a standard deviation of 15, so the same position lands at 145, a level reached by about 1 person in 740. On the old Stanford-Binet's standard deviation of 16 it would be 148. A true 160 on today's scale is far rarer, about 1 in 31,600, which is why the conversion matters.

Two further cautions apply. The test was normed on the wartime military population, not a modern national sample. And test norms drift over decades, the pattern known as the Flynn effect; our guide to historical IQ estimates explains why an old score cannot be read directly on a new scale.

Asimov's own doubts

What makes the essay worth reading is that Asimov turned on his own number. "All my life I've been registering scores like that," he wrote, then asked whether such scores simply showed he was good at the academic questions favored by the people who write intelligence tests, people whose minds resembled his.

His evidence was his auto-repair man. Asimov guessed the mechanic could not have scored more than 80 on such tests, yet whenever the car failed, Asimov brought it to him and treated his verdicts as oracles. Tests written by a mechanic, a carpenter or a farmer, Asimov argued, would have made him look foolish. "My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in," he concluded.

The mechanic then caught him with a riddle. A deaf-and-mute man buys nails by miming a hammer; how does a blind man buy scissors? Asimov made cutting motions with two fingers. The blind man simply asks. The mechanic said he had been certain Asimov would fall for it, because a man so educated could not be very smart. Asimov's last line: "And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there."

Asimov and Mensa

Asimov joined Mensa, the high-IQ society, in the early 1960s. He found many members arrogant about their supposed intelligence and let his membership lapse, rejoined after moving back to New York and spoke to Mensa groups, then resigned again. He served, reluctantly, as an honorary vice president of Mensa International and described some members as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs."

Mensa today admits people who score in the top 2 percent on an approved, supervised test: 130 on a scale with a standard deviation of 15. Asimov's reported result clears that line on any reading of the scale. For the current process, see how to join Mensa.

The record that matters more

The score is a footnote to the output. Asimov taught himself to read at 5 and graduated from high school at 15. He earned three degrees from Columbia University: a BS in 1939, an MA in 1941 and a PhD in chemistry in 1948. He joined the faculty of Boston University in 1949 and was promoted to full professor of biochemistry in 1979, though by 1952 he was already earning more from writing than from teaching.

In fiction, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted his 1941 story "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written in 1968. The first three Foundation books won the one-time Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966. He coined the word "robotics" in a 1941 robot story and stated the Three Laws of Robotics in "Runaround" in 1942.

In all, he wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books span nine of the ten main classes of the Dewey Decimal system, missing only philosophy and psychology. The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960) was nominated for a National Book Award.

Asimov and his peers

Asimov never pretended to modesty, which makes one concession notable. He described Carl Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own; the other was Marvin Minsky, a founder of artificial intelligence research at MIT.

Among public figures with a reported high score, the natural comparison is Marilyn vos Savant. Her famous 228 was a childhood ratio IQ, a different kind of number from Asimov's adult Army score; see what an IQ of 228 means. Most great writers, from Shakespeare onward, have no measured score at all.

How we assessed this

Asimov's score comes from his own essay, quoted verbatim from its anthologized text. The scale of the Army General Classification Test comes from a 2015 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Matthew Cancian and Michael Klein. Because Asimov did not name the test, the conversion to about 145 is conditional, and we label it that way. Mensa and biographical details come from standard reference sources.

Editorial standard: IQ figures for historical figures are retrospective estimates and are labeled as such; scores for living people appear only when the person disclosed them or a reputable outlet reported them. Corrections: contact the editors.