An 11-year-old Iranian school girl has just become the new face of braininess after receiving the highest possible score on the Mensa IQ test.
Tara Sharifi, a student from Aylesbury High School in the United Kingdom, recently took the test in Oxford and received an astounding 162 points. Sharifi's score is significantly over the "genius threshold" of 140.
Albert Einstein is believed to have had the same IQ as Professor Stephen Hawking, 160 (Einstein himself never took the IQ test and Stephen Hawking's score comes from another source).
It's an incredible accomplishment, and no one was more surprised than Tara herself.
“I was shocked when I got the result – I never expected to get such a good score,” Tara told The Bucks Herald.
“It was a joint decision between me and my parents to take the test."
Tara's impressive score means she now qualifies for Mensa membership (AKA the High IQ Society), where she'll get to contact other members, joining the ranks of highly publicized women like actress Geena Davis and US writer Joyce Carol Oates. Mensa membership has no age limitations at the moment. One-third of Mensa members in Australia are youngsters.
“It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet other people within the Mensa system. I have told some of my friends at school and they were really impressed,” Tara told The Bucks Herald.
Her father, Hossein Sharifi, told reporters that he was "very pleased" with his daughter, despite the fact that he was aware of her academic brilliance. “I figured she might do well when we watched TV and she would get maths questions before the contestants. I knew she was very clever, but I did not think she would have such a high IQ.”
The 11-year-old has indicated an interest in furthering her math studies – possibly a clue that she will follow in the footsteps of late Fields Medal-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani?
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