Marilyn Vos Savant, An Example Of Extreme Intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in different ways. Despite the many definitions, there seems to be agreement that intelligence is the ability to understand, assimilate and process information and use it to solve problems. Do you know Marilyn your Savant?
It’s often thought that Albert Einstein was the smartest person in the world, but… he wasn’t. There is more than one brilliant mind that surpasses it, but in this article we are going to talk specifically about one of them: that of Marilyn vos Savant.
She has been described as “the smartest person in the world”. You are now probably thinking that she was a brilliant scientist… well, nothing could be further from the truth. Read on to find out more about this amazing woman.
Who is Marilyn vos Savant?
Marilyn was born on August 11, 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri (United States). Her mother was Italian and her father German. She is a descendant of scientist Ernst Mach. The latter made important discoveries in the fields of optics, acoustics and thermodynamics.
At school, she was rejected because of her gender, and her teachers considered her intelligence to be useless, because she was a woman. Upon graduation, she enrolled in the University of Washington School of Philosophy, but after two years her family forced her to drop out of school and work in the family dry cleaners.
However, when she became financially independent, she began her writing career. Her second marriage was to Dr. Robert Jarvik, the pioneer of the “Jarvik-7” artificial heart. She has been its financial director and assistant in cardiovascular disease research and prevention.
She also worked at the National Museum of Women’s History. It was then that she received the “Women Making History” award for her fight against stereotypes about women.
Intelligence put to the test
During her childhood, she passed several intelligence tests: at the age of 7, she obtained 127 points. Three years later, at the age of 10, that score rose to 167. His best Stanford-Binet score was 228 points. Thanks to this score, she entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1986 as “the person with the highest IQ in the world”.
As a result, the media began to take an interest in his case. First, Parade magazine ran an article that included a question and answer section. The popularity of this idea led to the “Ask Marilyn” column, where she answered questions on math, logic, philosophy, politics and other more “ordinary” matters.
Her column is the source of her three books: Ask Marilyn: Answers to America’s Most Frequently Asked Questions (1992), More Marilyn: Some Like It Bright (1994) and Of Course I’m for Monogamy: I’m Also for Everlasting Peace and an End to Taxes (1996).
Intelligence exposed: Marilyn solves the “Monty Hall problem”
In 1990, Marilyn received a letter from Craig F. Whitaker containing the following statement
In other words, the question asked is: is it better in this case to change your initial choice? To that, Marilyn replied (without knowing what would happen to it):
After the solution was published, Parade began to receive letters full of insults towards Savant:
The solution approach
Despite the pressure, she refused to rectify and devoted four columns to breaking down the solution to the problem. In the second column, she proposed a method to clarify the probabilities. This consisted of listing all the possible outcomes of the game as follows:
| Gate 1 | Gate 2 | Gate 3 | Results | |
| Round 1 | Car | Goat | Goat | Change and lose |
| Round 2 | Goat | Car | Goat | Change and win |
| Round 3 | Goat | Goat | Car | Change and win |
| Round 4 | Car | Goat | Goat | Don’t change and lose |
| Round 5 | Goat | Car | Goat | Don’t change and lose |
| Round 6 | Goat | Goat | Car | Don’t change and lose |
You can see here that if you change the door the probability of getting the car is 2/3, whereas if you don’t change the door the probability of getting it is only 1/3.
In the third column, she explains the table and the probabilities. In the fourth, she reveals that many of her readers played at Monty Hall and now support her solution. Even the great mathematician Paul Erdös had to apologize for calling Savant’s solution incorrect!
The humility of Marilyn vos Savant
What bothered readers the most was not that the solution was an “attack” on common sense, but that it was a woman who solved the problem in public (although this problem had already been studied in different schools). and with different mathematicians). How can we believe that intelligence is only a man’s business? What a time!
Despite being one of the brightest women in the world and considered the smartest person, Marilyn is very humble. She admits that she doesn’t have great math skills or photographic memory.
She says her “strengths” are objective analysis, decision making and problem solving. Further, she argues that intelligent people may not be intelligent, but are likely to be highly educated in a specific field or highly specialized in a branch of knowledge.
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