Smart is the new sexy: 5 women whose intelligence inspires generations

With an IQ of 228 (190 in some sources), Marilyn vos Savant is not only the most intelligent women in the world (which is confirmed by Guinness Book of World Records), she is also the most intelligent person in history! Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, for example, are believed to have had an IQ of 160, while an average person has somewhere around 100.

Marylin uses her sharp brain to solve logical, mathematical or vocabulary puzzles posed by readers of her ‘Ask Marilyn’ weekly magazine column and daily website column since 1986. You can enjoy the crème de la crème of her articles in her books: Ask Marilyn, More Marilyn, and Of Course, I’m for Monogamy.

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Ever been so bored of only being noticed for your gorgeous body that to spite all those narrow-minded admirers you go on and invent technology that would make Wi-Fi and Bluetooth possible? ‘Cause that’s exactly what this Austrian-born actress did during World War II.

Hedy Lamarr is the person behind the revolutionary frequency-hopping signal that became the groundstone for technologies we now can’t imagine our life without.

We can also thank Hedy Lamarr for improving traffic lights and inventing a tablet that dissolves in water to create a carbonated drink. And the wildest part of this whole story is that Hedy is a self-taught inventor, who worked on her inventions in her free time!

Black female mathematicians developing space ships and space technologies for NASA – if that sounds familiar, you’ve probably already seen Hidden Figures or have read the book under the same name.

It’s a true story and the one where intelligent women had to fight their way through walls and walls of prejudice, lead by the fierce and fearless Katherine Johnson who helped American astronauts land on the Moon by calculating the spacecraft flight-paths.

Mary Shelley was only 18 years old when she started writing the first known science fiction novel in history. Not only that but it’s also one of the most well-known and popular books of all times. We mean Frankenstein, of course! Besides being the world’s first science fiction novel, Frankenstein is also often called the first horror novel in literature.

The story is based on a nightmare she had after a philosophical conversation with her friends about galvanism and re-animating the dead.

Fun fact. Mary Shelley was a good friend of poet Lord Byron. And Ada Lovelace is his daughter. What an amazing group of gifted people they were!

Anyway, while her father’s friend left her mark in history by inventing a new genre in literature, Ada was the first person to predict the possibility of those smart machines we now call computers. She said that they ‘might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use’.

What’s more, she even invented the first computer programme – it was only a plan for how the engine, described by mathematician Charles Babbage, might calculate Bernoulli numbers but though theoretical, that’s still an actual programme.