Marilyn vos Savant

On June 22, 2014, Savant made an error in a word problem. The question was: "If two people could complete a project in six hours, how long would it take each of them to do identical projects on their own, given that one took four hours longer than the other?" Her answer was 10 hours and 14 hours, reasoning that if together it took them 6 hours to complete a project, then the total effort was 12 "man hours". If they then each do a separate full project, the total effort needed would be 24 hours, so the answer (10+14) needed to add up to 24 with a difference of 4. Savant later issued a correction, as the answer ignored the fact that the two people get different amounts of work done per hour: if they are working jointly on a project, they can maximize their combined productivity, but if they split the work in half, one person will finish sooner and cannot fully contribute. This subtlety causes the problem to require solving a quadratic equation and does not have a rational solution. Instead, the answer is 4 + 40 {\displaystyle 4+{\sqrt {40}}} (approximately 10.32) and 8 + 40 {\displaystyle 8+{\sqrt {40}}} (approximately 14.32) hours.

On January 22, 2012, Savant admitted a mistake in her column. In the original column, published on December 25, 2011, a reader asked:

The problem re-emerged in 1996–97 with two cases juxtaposed:

Savant retracted the argument in a July 1995 addendum, saying she saw the theorem as "an intellectual challenge – 'to find another proof using only tools available to Fermat in the 17th century.'"

A few months after Andrew Wiles said he had proved Fermat's Last Theorem, Savant published the book The World's Most Famous Math Problem (October 1993), which surveys the history of Fermat's Last Theorem as well as other mathematical problems. Reviewers questioned her criticism of Wiles' proof; asking whether it was based on a correct understanding of mathematical induction, proof by contradiction, and imaginary numbers.

Like the Monty Hall problem, the "two boys" or "second-sibling" problem predates Ask Marilyn, but generated controversy in the column, first appearing there in 1991–1992 in the context of baby beagles:

Savant was asked the following question in her September 9, 1990, column:

Savant married Robert Jarvik (one of the co-developers of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart) on August 23, 1987, and was made Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart, Inc. She has served on the board of directors of the National Council on Economic Education, on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women's History Museum, and as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Toastmasters International named her one of "Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999", and in 2003 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The College of New Jersey.

Following her listing in the 1986 Guinness Book of World Records, Parade ran a profile of her along with a selection of questions from Parade readers and her answers. Parade continued to get questions, so "Ask Marilyn" was made.

Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ" from 1985 to 1989 and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988. Guinness retired the "Highest IQ" category in 1990 after concluding IQ tests were too unreliable to designate a single record holder. The listing drew nationwide attention.

She went to Meramec Community College and studied philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis but quit two years later to help with a family investment business. Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue a career in writing. Before starting "Ask Marilyn", she wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which included intelligence quotient (IQ) quizzes and expositions on intelligence and its testing.

The second test reported by Guinness was Hoeflin's Mega Test, taken in the mid-1980s. The Mega Test yields IQ standard scores obtained by multiplying the subject's normalized z-score, or the rarity of the raw test score, by a constant standard deviation and adding the product to 100, with Savant's raw score reported by Hoeflin to be 46 out of a possible 48, with a 5.4 z-score, and a standard deviation of 16, arriving at a 186 IQ. The Mega Test has been criticized by professional psychologists as improperly designed and scored, "nothing short of number pulverization".

Marilyn vos Savant (/ˌvɒs səˈvɑːnt/; born Marilyn Mach; August 11, 1946) is an American magazine columnist who has the highest recorded intelligence quotient (IQ) in the Guinness Book of Records, a competitive category the publication has since retired. Since 1986, she has written "Ask Marilyn", a Parade magazine Sunday column wherein she solves puzzles and answers questions on various subjects, and which popularized the Monty Hall problem in 1990.

Marilyn vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach on August 11, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri, to parents Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant. Savant says one should keep premarital surnames, with sons taking their fathers' and daughters their mothers'. The word savant, meaning someone of learning, appears twice in her family: her grandmother's name was Savant; her grandfather's, vos Savant. She is of Italian, Czechoslovak, German, and Austrian ancestry, being descended from the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.

Guinness cited vos Savant's performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age ten. She says her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score. This figure was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records; it is also listed in her books' biographical sections and was given by her in interviews.