🇬🇧 Anushka Dixit

The test room at the University of East London on April 20, 2019, held adults — professionals, academics, people who had spent years preparing for this particular measure of themselves. Among them sat an eleven-year-old girl from Barkingside who had requested to be there. Not because her parents insisted, not because a school had directed her — but because Anushka Dixit had passed her 11-plus exam and wanted, as she put it, a new challenge. The test she sat was Mensa's official IQ assessment. She scored 162. The maximum possible. Two points higher than the estimated IQs of both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The adults in the room had not expected this. Almost nobody does, when it happens.

Anushka Dixit grew up in the London suburb of Barkingside, the only child of her mother Arti Dixit. The signs of exceptional intelligence arrived early enough that they were simply part of the texture of her childhood. She began speaking at six months — not babbling, but imitating complete words from television commercials, her mother recalls, with an accuracy that was startling. She showed early facility with reading, numbers, and memory. By the time she reached primary school, she was at Avanti Court Primary School in Carlton Drive, where her teachers noted that the ordinary pace of instruction was often not quite enough for her.

But it was the 11-plus examination — the selective secondary school entrance exam used in parts of England — that first gave Anushka's abilities a formal public measurement. She passed it. She was subsequently offered places at five grammar schools, eventually choosing Woodford County High School for Girls. The 11-plus passage led to her mother's suggestion that Anushka might want to explore further intellectual challenges. Anushka's response was characteristically direct: she asked to take the Mensa test. Mensa, the world's oldest and most well-known high-IQ society, requires members to demonstrate intelligence in the top two percent of the general population.

In the weeks before her Mensa test, Anushka memorised the entire periodic table — all 118 elements, their atomic numbers, symbols, and properties — in under forty minutes. This was not assigned preparation for Mensa; the test does not require it. It was something she did because she was curious, because the periodic table interested her, and because memorisation of complex structured information felt like a form of play rather than work. The forty-minute timeline was witnessed and verified. It remains one of the more striking ancillary details of her story — a demonstration of cognitive ability that sits alongside the main headline without quite being the main headline.

The Mensa test result — 162 — placed Anushka among the rarest fraction of human intelligence ever measured. A score of 130 qualifies for Mensa; 140 is conventionally called "genius" threshold; 162 is as high as the standard Mensa assessment can register. Albert Einstein's IQ was estimated posthumously at approximately 160; Stephen Hawking's was publicly stated to be 160. Anushka surpassed both by two points. Mensa UK confirmed the result. Anushka, interviewed by the BBC afterward, described the test as "easier than I expected." She was eleven years old.

What makes her story more than an IQ footnote is the combination of qualities the number implies and cannot fully capture. She is described by those who know her as intellectually insatiable — drawn to science, mathematics, and literature with equal enthusiasm, less interested in being labeled clever than in understanding things. She has spoken about wanting to pursue medicine or scientific research, about the importance of education for girls, about the value of setting goals that feel slightly out of reach. The girl who sat in that test room at the University of East London and quietly wrote the highest possible score was not trying to beat Einstein. She was looking for a challenge. She found one. And then she exceeded it.