Mathematician Terence Tao tops our list of the most intelligent people alive in October 2026, with a Fields Medal, a professorship at UCLA and a record of solving problems others could not. This list ranks ten living people by verified intellectual achievement: major prizes, proofs and breakthroughs. We do not rank by IQ, because published scores for famous people are rarely verified and the testing record is unreliable.
| Rank | Name | Field | Signature achievement |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terence Tao | Mathematics | Fields Medal, 2006 |
| 2 | Andrew Wiles | Mathematics | Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem |
| 3 | Edward Witten | Physics | Fields Medal as a physicist, 1990 |
| 4 | Demis Hassabis | AI and biology | Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2024 |
| 5 | Geoffrey Hinton | AI | Nobel Prize in Physics, 2024 |
| 6 | Peter Scholze | Mathematics | Fields Medal at age 30, 2018 |
| 7 | Grigori Perelman | Mathematics | Proof of the Poincare conjecture |
| 8 | Garry Kasparov | Chess | World No. 1 for 255 months |
| 9 | Judit Polgar | Chess | Strongest female player in history |
| 10 | Marilyn vos Savant | Writing and puzzles | Record IQ listing, 1985 to 1989 |
1. Terence Tao
Terence Tao was born in Adelaide in 1975 and won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad at age 13. He is a professor of mathematics at UCLA, and his work spans harmonic analysis, number theory, combinatorics and partial differential equations.
He won the Fields Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014 and the Princess of Asturias Award in 2020.
He ranks first for the widest range of top-level results of any living mathematician, honored by every major prize.
2. Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew Wiles, born in 1953, is a British mathematician at the University of Oxford. He proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, a problem unsolved for more than 350 years, after presenting a first proof in 1993 and a corrected version in 1994, published in 1995.
His honors include the Wolf Prize, the Shaw Prize in 2005, the Abel Prize in 2016 and the Copley Medal in 2017.
Solving one of the most famous problems in the history of mathematics earns Wiles the second spot.
3. Edward Witten
Edward Witten, born in 1951, is a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is a central figure in string theory and in 1995 helped launch the second revolution in the field with M-theory.
In 1990 he became the first physicist to win the Fields Medal, the top prize in mathematics.
Witten is the only physicist to win mathematics’ highest honor, which shows how far his ideas reach across both fields.
4. Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis, born in London in 1976, reached chess master standard at 13 and founded a video game studio in 1998 before turning to neuroscience and AI. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and its AlphaGo program beat Go champion Lee Sedol 4 to 1 in 2016.
His team’s AlphaFold system predicted protein structures at scale, and it earned him a share of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was knighted the same year and also leads Isomorphic Labs.
A childhood strength in games became a scientific tool that changed biology, and that earns the fourth place.
5. Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Hinton, born in 1947, is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and a pioneer of neural networks, the technology behind modern AI. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.
In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield for foundational work on artificial neural networks.
Decades of work on neural networks became the basis of today’s AI systems, which lands him fifth.
6. Peter Scholze
Peter Scholze was born in Dresden in 1987 and became a full professor at the University of Bonn at 24. In 2018, at age 30, he won the Fields Medal for transforming arithmetic algebraic geometry.
He is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, where he works on perfectoid spaces and condensed mathematics.
Few Fields Medal winners have been so young or so original, so Scholze takes sixth.
7. Grigori Perelman
Grigori Perelman, born in 1966, won a perfect-score gold medal at the 1982 International Mathematical Olympiad. In 2002 and 2003 he posted proofs that settled the Poincare conjecture, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems.
He declined the Fields Medal in 2006 and the one million dollar Millennium Prize in 2010 and has lived a famously private life since.
He settled a century-old problem and turned down the prizes that came with it. That puts him seventh.
8. Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov became the youngest undisputed world chess champion in 1985 at age 22 and held the No. 1 ranking for 255 months. He retired from competitive chess in 2005.
He lost a six-game match to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, an event that shaped how the world thinks about AI.
Two decades at the top of one of the most demanding mental games explain the eighth place.
9. Judit Polgar
Judit Polgar became a grandmaster in 1991 at 15 years and 4 months, then the youngest ever. Her peak rating was 2735, and she reached No. 8 in the world in 2004.
She has beaten 11 current or former world champions, including Garry Kasparov in 2002 and Magnus Carlsen, and she retired from competition in 2014.
Polgar is the strongest woman in chess history and competed head to head with the men’s elite, hence ninth.
10. Marilyn vos Savant
Marilyn vos Savant, born in 1946, was listed in the Guinness record book under “Highest IQ” from 1985 to 1989. Guinness retired the category in 1990 because IQ tests were judged too unreliable to name a single record holder.
She began her “Ask Marilyn” question-and-answer column in 1986 and became widely known for her answer to the Monty Hall problem.
Her place rests more on public profile than on peer-reviewed work, which is why a record listing and decades of public puzzle-solving only get her tenth.
FAQ
Who is the smartest person alive?
There is no official answer, but mathematician Terence Tao is the strongest candidate on verified achievements. He holds a Fields Medal and has made major advances across several fields.
Why does this list not use IQ scores?
IQ scores for famous people are often self-reported or tested on different scales. We rank on prizes, proofs and breakthroughs that can be checked.
Who joined or left the list?
Edward Witten, Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton, Peter Scholze and Grigori Perelman joined. Stephen Hawking and Paul Allen, who both died in 2018, were removed along with Rick Rosner, Kim Ung-Yong and Christopher Hirata, whose IQ-based claims we could not verify.
Which Nobel winners are on the list?
Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. Both are recognized for work on artificial intelligence.
Does a high IQ make you successful?
Not on its own. Every person here pairs exceptional reasoning with years of focused work in one field.
How we put this list together
We compared living people who have won the highest honors in mathematics, science, AI, chess and public problem-solving. We ranked them on verified prizes, proofs and records rather than on test scores.
Last updated: October 2026.
