Who Is the World's Smartest Mathematician Alive? Prizes Show, IQ Cannot

Nobody can name the world's smartest mathematician alive from IQ, because none of the living mathematicians people search for has a published adult IQ score. By prizes, which can be checked, Simon Donaldson leads: he holds four of the five top mathematics honours (the Fields Medal and the Wolf, Shaw and Breakthrough prizes), and 13 other living mathematicians hold three. A prize count shows achievement, not intelligence.

The new finding is the count itself. We tallied five prize lists as they stood on 4 November 2026, including the 2026 Fields Medals and the 2026 Abel Prize, and kept the people who are alive. The best-known names rank lower than you might expect. Terence Tao holds two of the five, Edward Witten one, and Grigori Perelman none. Below: the ranking, how we counted, and what IQ can and cannot add.

Who is the smartest mathematician alive?

No one can be named for certain, because no prize measures intelligence. The living mathematician with the longest record on five top lists is Simon Donaldson, who holds the Fields Medal (1986), the Shaw Prize (2009), the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2015) and the Wolf Prize (2020). We found no living mathematician who holds all five.

• 4 of 5, Simon Donaldson: Fields Medal 1986, Shaw Prize 2009, Breakthrough Prize 2015, Wolf Prize 2020
• 3 of 5, Luis Caffarelli: Wolf Prize 2012, Shaw Prize 2018, Abel Prize 2023
• 3 of 5, Pierre Deligne: Fields Medal 1978, Wolf Prize 2008, Abel Prize 2013
• 3 of 5, Vladimir Drinfeld: Fields Medal 1990, Wolf Prize 2018, Shaw Prize 2023
• 3 of 5, Gerd Faltings: Fields Medal 1986, Shaw Prize 2015, Abel Prize 2026
• 3 of 5, Maxim Kontsevich: Fields Medal 1998, Shaw Prize 2012, Breakthrough Prize 2015
• 3 of 5, Robert Langlands: Wolf Prize 1995/96, Shaw Prize 2007, Abel Prize 2018
• 3 of 5, Gregory Margulis: Fields Medal 1978, Wolf Prize 2005, Abel Prize 2020
• 3 of 5, John Milnor: Fields Medal 1962, Wolf Prize 1989, Abel Prize 2011
• 3 of 5, David Mumford: Fields Medal 1974, Shaw Prize 2006, Wolf Prize 2008
• 3 of 5, Jean-Pierre Serre: Fields Medal 1954, Wolf Prize 2000, Abel Prize 2003
• 3 of 5, John Thompson: Fields Medal 1970, Wolf Prize 1992, Abel Prize 2008
• 3 of 5, Andrew Wiles: Wolf Prize 1995/96, Shaw Prize 2005, Abel Prize 2016
• 3 of 5, Shing-Tung Yau: Fields Medal 1982, Wolf Prize 2010, Shaw Prize 2023
• 2 of 5, Terence Tao: Fields Medal 2006, Breakthrough Prize 2015
• 1 of 5, Edward Witten: Fields Medal 1990
• 0 of 5, Grigori Perelman: Fields Medal 2006 offered and declined

Ties are common, so the three-honour names are in alphabetical order. The four 2026 Fields Medalists, Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman and Hong Wang, each hold only that medal on these lists so far. Wiles has no Fields Medal: the IMU offered him a special silver plaque in 1998, which we do not count.

How do you rank the world's smartest mathematician without an IQ?

You rank the record, not the person. We counted five honours that mathematicians treat as top-level, and listed them in the table below with who gives them and when.

• Fields Medal: given every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians. The International Mathematical Union (IMU) lists 68 medalists from 1936 to 2026, including Deng, Pardon, Tsimerman and Wang in 2026 (Perelman declined his)
• Abel Prize: given each year since 2003 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The Abel Prize site lists Gerd Faltings as the 2026 laureate
• Wolf Prize in Mathematics: given by the Wolf Foundation in Israel since 1978; Donaldson shared the 2020 prize with Yakov Eliashberg
• Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences: given from Hong Kong since 2004. Donaldson shared the 2009 prize with Clifford Taubes
• Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics: awarded since 2015; the laureate list names Frank Merle for 2026

We read the Wolf, Shaw and Breakthrough winners from their public tables and checked Donaldson's entries against each foundation. We counted only living people, using each person's current biography on 4 November 2026. Many outstanding mathematicians hold none of these five, so a low count is not a low ability.

Does any famous mathematician have a published IQ score?

Not an adult test score, for the best-known names, as far as we could find. Here is what exists for four of them.

• Terence Tao, 2 of 5: on his own website he writes that a Stanford-Binet test at age six matched a typical 14-year-old, so "just over 220" follows by simple division. He adds that the test is very noisy at that range and a realistic estimate is "greater than 175". He has taken no such test since age eight. Our Terence Tao profile covers the sources
• Grigori Perelman, 0 of 5: the IMU records that he declined his 2006 Fields Medal. The Clay Mathematics Institute credits him with the solution of the Poincaré conjecture, announced in preprints in 2002 and 2003. The figure that circulates for him cites no test, as our Perelman profile shows
• Edward Witten, 1 of 5: he won the Fields Medal in 1990. His profile on our site found no published IQ test result, and the figures that circulate are guesses
• John von Neumann (1903-1957): not alive, so not ranked. No documented IQ test exists for him, and the 300 that circulates has no traceable source (see our von Neumann profile)

Tao's six-year-old result is a ratio IQ, mental age divided by real age. That old formula can give 220 for a child and means nothing for an adult; our guide to ratio versus deviation IQ explains why. Where the other circulating numbers come from is in our look at celebrity IQ figures.

What is the average IQ of mathematicians?

No study we found measured the IQ of a representative group of working mathematicians, so there is no average to quote. The nearest numbers are old and indirect.

Catharine Cox estimated IQs for 301 historical geniuses in 1926, working from their biographies, not from tests. Her raters averaged 150.8 for the 43 people she labelled scientists, and her "corrected" average for them was 173.0. That group is scientists in general, not only mathematicians. Our study of Cox's 1926 data has the full table and its limits.

Treat any "average IQ of mathematicians" on the web as a guess unless it names a test, a sample and a year. A real figure also needs its scale. IQ is a position on a bell curve, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 on most modern tests. The IQ bell curve shows what that means.

Is the Fields Medal a measure of intelligence?

No. The Fields Medal rewards mathematical achievement, and it comes with an age rule: a candidate's 40th birthday must not fall before 1 January of the year of the Congress, according to the IMU.

That rule shapes the numbers. In our study of top science prize winners, the median Fields Medal winner was 36 when the prize was announced (68 awards), against 76 for the Abel Prize (29 awards). So a prize count rewards years as well as ability. Older mathematicians have had longer to collect honours.

For a wider view, our age at breakthrough study found a median age of 39 at the prize-winning work in 663 discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine. We could not repeat that for mathematicians, because the date of their key work is rarely recorded.

Who is the smartest mathematician ever?

No one can be named, because no test or scale spans the centuries. The closest thing to a list is Cox's 1926 study, and its high numbers are the weakest ones. Only 9 of her 301 geniuses were estimated at 180 or more for ages 17 to 26, and figures quoted today, such as Newton's 190, are her "corrected" ones.

For the record-holders people quote, our guide to the highest IQ ever recorded traces each number to its source. For what high early scorers went on to do, see what the SMPY study found.

If you want a number for yourself, take the IQ test. Then use the IQ percentile calculator to see how rare any score is on the bell curve.

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