Indian-Origin Girl Beats Stephen Hawking, Einstein In British Mensa

A 12-year-old Indian-origin girl has broken the records of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking in the British Mensa IQ test. Rajgauri Pawar scored 162 while Stephen Hawking had scored 160. Now she has become a part of the elite British Mensa membership for high IQ talents across the globe by scoring in the top one per cent.

“I am just feeling on top of the world and can’t explain in words. It’s an honour for me to represent India on foreign soil and achieve such a feat,” Rajgauri told The Indian Express.

Rajgauri is originally from Baramati in Pune district and her father, Dr Surajkumar  Pawar, is a research scientist at the University of Manchester. Currently, there are only 20,000 such individuals in the whole world. Of them, only 1,500 are children, which constitutes only 2%.

“My daughter with a top 1% score leads the tally, making her one of the youngest to achieve such a feat,” beamed the father about Rajgauri’s extraordinary achievement.

Rajgauri was nervous before the test. “But it was fine and I’m really pleased to have done so well. I would like to pursue medicine in the future and am also inclined towards topics, including Physics, Astronomy and Environment,” she said, adding that swimming, netball and chess were among her favourite sports.

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“I was preparing for entrance exams to secondary schools. I secured admission at Altrincham Girls Grammar School, which is one of the coveted institutions in the UK, and my parents suggested that I attempt the British Mensa IQ test. Anyone above the age of 10.5 years can take the test. As it was something different and was like a competition across all age groups, it sounded interesting and worth focusing on.”

The young girl told IE that the preparation does not include school syllabus but is more of aptitude test, evaluating the candidate's non-verbal reasoning.

“Hence, it was challenging. The test was kind of a mixed bag, easy at the beginning and got tough at the end. The key difficulty was completing the test in time. So you are basically judged based on your skill set to manage time and the correctness of your answers,” said Rajgauri.

Last year, another Indian-origin child, Dhruv Talati (11) had scored 162 in the coveted test.

Picture credit- India