| Rank | Name | IQ | Born | Known For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 1st | William James Sidis 🇺🇸 | 250 | 1898 | The Animate And The Inanimate |
| 2 2nd | Satyendra Nath Bose 🇮🇳 | 185 | 1894 | Bose–Einstein condensateBose–Einstein statisticsBose–Einstein distributionBose–Einstein correlations… |
| 3 3rd | Louis de Broglie 🇫🇷 | 180 | 1892 | Wave nature of electrons <br> De Broglie–Bohm theoryde <br> Broglie wavelength |
| 4 | Frederick Rossini 🇺🇸 | 180 | 1899 | Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances |
| 5 | Jorge Luis Borges 🇦🇷 | 180 | 1899 | A Universal History of Infamy (1935), Ficciones (1944), El Aleph (1949), Labyrinths (1962) and The B… |
| 6 | Wilder Penfield 🇺🇸 | 170 | 1891 | Prompting memory recall during surgery via temporal lobe stimulationTreatment of epilepsy by surgery… |
| 7 | Norbert Wiener 🇺🇸 | 170 | 1894 | Cybernetics |
| 8 | Ernest Hemingway 🇺🇸 | 170 | 1899 | A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea |
| 9 | Clive Staples Lewis 🇬🇧 | 150 | 1898 | The Chronicles of Narnia <br> Mere Christianity <br> The Allegory of Love <br> The Screwtape Letters… |
| 10 | Martha Graham 🇺🇸 | 148 | 1894 | Dance and choreography |
| 11 | F. Scott Fitzgerald 🇺🇸 | 145 | 1896 | The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934) |
| 12 | Lawrence Bragg 🇦🇺 | — | 1890 | X-ray diffractionX-ray spectroscopyX-ray microscopyBubble raftBragg's lawBragg-Gray cavity theoryBra… |
| 13 | Ronald Fisher 🇬🇧 | — | 1890 | Fisher's principle, Fisher information, Invented experimental design, devised the statistical concep… |
| 14 | Sergei Prokofiev 🇺🇦 | — | 1891 | Composed an opera at age nine |
| 15 | James Chadwick 🇬🇧 | — | 1891 | Discovery of the neutron <br> MAUD Committee Report <br> Manhattan Project |
The Belle Époque combined extraordinary scientific progress with social tension and the first stirrings of modernism in art and culture. Freud was developing psychoanalysis in Vienna, the young Einstein was absorbing Maxwell's equations, Röntgen discovered X-rays, and the first modern Olympics were held in Athens. Impressionism was giving way to Post-Impressionism and the stage was being set for the great ruptures of the twentieth century.
William James Sidis is ranked #1 among geniuses born in the 1890s with an estimated IQ of 250, known for The Animate And The Inanimate.
Our database includes 28 notable geniuses born between 1890–1899, spanning fields from science and mathematics to philosophy, literature, and the arts.
The average estimated IQ of documented geniuses born in the 1890s is 175, with the highest recorded being 250.
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