Estimating the IQ of Terence Tao
A summary of his accomplishments:
Scored a 760 on the SATM when he was 8 years old
Youngest winner of each of the medals of the international mathematical olympiad
Recieved his PhD when he was 21
Has recieved dozens of awards and prizes
h-index of 106, 90000 citations
I think it’s safe to say that Terence Tao is the best mathematician in the world, which translates to a math IQ of 200. He also performed very well on the ravens, he scored a 32 on the RAPM when he was 10, which is the 95th percentile for a white adult in the USA.
Given that a large mathematical composite test has a g-loading of about 0.77, Terence Tao has an IQ of about 173 with a standard error of roughly sqrt(1-0.77)*15 = 7.2
A commenter notes that he scores about 3.7 standard deviations below verbal in mathematical ability - though his mathematical ability is about 6.6 SD above the mean, so his relatively low verbal score isn’t particularly meaningful.
"When I was six years old, I was given the Stanford Binet test and obtained a score that was equivalent to that attained by a typical 14-year old. Based on this, an IQ of just over 220 could be inferred by simple division, but the test is extremely noisy at these scales, and with realistic error bars a more accurate estimate would be “greater than 175”. This was documented in the book “Exceptionally gifted children” by Miraca Gross, where I was given the pseudonym “Adrian Seng”; a relevant excerpt can be found here.
But there is no reason to expect that this ratio would continue in my later years; I did take some other cognitive tests at age eight (see the article of Clements linked to above), but have not taken such tests since."
From his blog: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/