The smartest women in history

Catharine Cox's 1926 study rated 301 people, and only a handful were women, because the source list she drew on reflected who had been allowed to become eminent. That gap runs through every historical IQ list. Sophie Germain studied under a man's name; Emmy Noether lectured unpaid under a male colleague's name; Lise Meitner was left off the Nobel Prize for the fission she helped explain.

The estimates here follow exactly the same rules as for men: a documented study figure where one exists, otherwise an editorial marker built from the record, with a range and a confidence level. Where barriers limited what a woman could achieve or what was recorded, the profile says so, because an estimate built from achievement will understate people who were kept from achieving.

Mathematicians and physicists lead: Emmy Noether, whose theorem links symmetry to conservation laws; Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal; Marie Curie, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences; and Ada Lovelace, who saw what a programmable machine could become. Their work offers the most concrete evidence of reasoning ability.

Rulers and reformers appear with wider ranges. Elizabeth I spoke several languages and outmanoeuvred a court of hostile men for 44 years; Catherine the Great corresponded with Voltaire; Harriet Tubman planned rescues without being able to read. Their intelligence was practical and political, and the markers are deliberately cautious.

Writers such as Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley are ranked on the documented record, not on style. Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at 18; Woolf educated herself in her father's library because her brothers went to Cambridge and she could not.

Living women with famous claimed scores, such as Marilyn vos Savant, have their own profiles that trace where the number came from, but they are not mixed into a ranking of historical estimates. Women without a full profile yet are added as new batches are published.