Albus Dumbledore IQ

Dumbledore is the strongest wizard in the books and one of the smartest, and the two are easy to mix up. His strategic thinking is the real evidence: he works out how Voldemort made himself so hard to kill, sets a plan in motion over years and arranges his own death to protect two people. He is not higher because of a run of preventable errors, from the ring to how he manages Harry. He is not lower because most of his strategies actually work.

Adult, about 115 at the time of his death.

Six ratings out of ten, each based on what is shown on the page or screen. They are how the estimate is built, not a substitute for it.

Deduction8/10

Solving new problems from thin information

Strategy9/10

Multi-step plans that account for other minds

Knowledge9/10

Depth and breadth of what they know

Invention6/10

Building or devising something genuinely new

Adaptability8/10

Recovering when the plan breaks

Reading people9/10

Understanding what other people want and will do

1. A scholar's reputation

   Moderate evidence

   Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Chocolate Frog card), Deathly Hallows (backstory)

   Dumbledore's chocolate frog card credits him with the twelve uses of dragon's blood and with alchemy alongside Nicolas Flamel, and the wider books add his defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald in a duel in 1945, after which he holds the Elder Wand. The duel is reported and not shown, and part of it is raw power. The scholarship is the surer part: breadth in the field, recognised by his peers, before he ever becomes a headmaster.

2. The Mirror as a lock

   Moderate evidence

   Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

   Dumbledore hides the Stone in the Mirror of Erised with an enchantment that hands it over only to someone who wants to find it and not to use it. It is an elegant idea, because it makes a person's motives the lock. It works: Quirrell stands in front of the mirror and cannot get the Stone, while Harry, who only wants to keep it safe, feels it drop into his pocket. The teachers' other defences were beaten by first-years, but the mirror held.

3. Facing Voldemort at the Ministry

   Minor evidence

   Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

   When Voldemort appears in the Department of Mysteries fight, Dumbledore arrives and thwarts him, duelling him in the Atrium until Voldemort flees. Dumbledore founded and leads the Order of the Phoenix, so this is a public demonstration that he is the wizard the enemy fears. It supports the power side of his reputation more than the intellectual one, although running an underground resistance for years also takes steady, patient judgement.

4. Reconstructing the Horcruxes

   Strong evidence

   Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

   Dumbledore works out that Voldemort split his soul into seven pieces and intended six Horcruxes, and he builds a strategy for finding and destroying them. He does it by collecting memories of Tom Riddle from people who dealt with him over decades, from a house-elf to his old Potions teacher, and reading the pattern in them. This is deduction from thin information: the Ministry and the Order have nothing else. It is his strongest single piece of reasoning.

5. The plan with Snape

   Strong evidence

   Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

   Knowing he is dying from the ring's curse, Dumbledore asks Snape to kill him. That spares Draco Malfoy from having to commit the murder and secures Voldemort's complete trust in Snape. He has to predict what Voldemort will do, what Snape will accept and what Draco will attempt. The plan is cold and it works, and few characters in the series could build a scheme of this kind around their own death.

6. Bequests that point somewhere

   Minor evidence

   Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

   Dumbledore's will leaves Ron the Deluminator, Hermione a book of fairy tales and Harry the first Snitch he ever caught. None of it explains itself. Each item ends up mattering to the hunt, because the bequests point at the right people, although it leaves the trio with very little to go on and a lot of guessing. It is long-range planning with a built-in weakness: he trusts them to work it out unaided.

• Putting on the ringHarry Potter and the Half-Blood PrinceDumbledore puts on Marvolo Gaunt's ring, which is cursed. His hand withers and blackens, and Snape's containment slows the curse, leaving him about a year to live. It is a serious lapse for someone who understood Voldemort's methods. He admits he was tempted by the Resurrection Stone in the ring, so the error was emotional, but it is still an error.
• ArianaHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (backstory)His sister Ariana dies during a three-way duel involving Dumbledore, his brother Aberforth and Grindelwald, and Dumbledore never knows whose spell killed her. The young Dumbledore had been drawn into a plan whose flaws he chose not to examine. It is a formative failure, and it shows that even the most gifted student in the school's history was, at that age, easy to lead by a charming person.
• Keeping Harry at a distanceHarry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixAfter Voldemort's return, Dumbledore avoids Harry and withholds what he knows, and Voldemort exploits a fake vision to lure Harry to the Department of Mysteries, where Sirius dies. Dumbledore admits the mistake. Each choice had a rationale, but the pattern is a habit of assuming his plans will hold when they depend on others' good sense and on silence.

Planning under uncertainty is his best category: the Horcrux hunt and the arrangement with Snape are multi-year plans that account for other people's psychology. Knowledge is very high, and invention is moderate, since the books show him mostly refining known magic. His errors weigh on the estimate, mostly because they are emotional rather than tactical. Fan figures often run very high on the strength of his power. We hold that power is not intelligence, and that the books show a great but fallible mind.

IQ estimates for fictional characters are fan analysis: an argument from what the story shows, not a measurement. Read the full method and the standards we hold every profile to.

The common argument is whether Dumbledore is a mastermind or a manipulator who was lucky, and whether he is smarter than Voldemort. Detractors point to the ring, to Ariana and to the way he handles Harry. Defenders point to the Horcrux deduction and the Snape plan. We think he is smarter than Voldemort in almost every respect except ruthlessness, and that the flaw the books emphasise is emotional. He is a very good strategist who does not always trust his own advice, and that limits how high his estimate sits.

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