Marilyn vos Savant
BornMarilyn Mach
(1946-08-11) August 11, 1946[1]
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation
Spouse
​
(m. 1987)​
Children2[2]

Marilyn vos Savant (/ˌvɒs səˈvɑːnt/; born Marilyn Mach; August 11, 1946) is an American magazine columnist who has the highest recorded intelligence quotient (IQ) in the Guinness Book of Records, a competitive category the publication has since retired. Since 1986, she has written "Ask Marilyn", a Parade magazine Sunday column wherein she solves puzzles and answers questions on various subjects, and which popularized the Monty Hall problem in 1990.

Biography

Marilyn vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach[3] on August 11, 1946,[1] in St. Louis, Missouri, to parents Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant. Savant says one should keep premarital surnames, with sons taking their fathers' and daughters their mothers'.[4][5] The word savant, meaning someone of learning, appears twice in her family: her grandmother's name was Savant; her grandfather's, vos Savant. She is of Italian, Czechoslovak,[6] German,[7] and Austrian ancestry, being descended from the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.[8]

As a teenager Savant worked in her father's general store and wrote for local newspapers using pseudonyms. She married at 16 and divorced ten years later. Her second marriage ended when she was 35.

She went to Meramec Community College and studied philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis but quit two years later to help with a family investment business. Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue a career in writing. Before starting "Ask Marilyn", she wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which included intelligence quotient (IQ) quizzes and expositions on intelligence and its testing.

Savant married Robert Jarvik (one of the co-developers of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart) on August 23, 1987,[9][10] and was made Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart, Inc. She has served on the board of directors of the National Council on Economic Education, on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women's History Museum,[11] and as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.[12] Toastmasters International named her one of "Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999", and in 2003 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The College of New Jersey.

Rise to fame and IQ score

Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ" from 1985 to 1989[3] and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988.[3][13] Guinness retired the "Highest IQ" category in 1990 after concluding IQ tests were too unreliable to designate a single record holder.[3] The listing drew nationwide attention.[14]

Guinness cited vos Savant's performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age ten.[7] She says her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score.[7] This figure was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records; it is also listed in her books' biographical sections and was given by her in interviews.

The second test reported by Guinness was Hoeflin's Mega Test, taken in the mid-1980s. The Mega Test yields IQ standard scores obtained by multiplying the subject's normalized z-score, or the rarity of the raw test score, by a constant standard deviation and adding the product to 100, with Savant's raw score reported by Hoeflin to be 46 out of a possible 48, with a 5.4 z-score, and a standard deviation of 16, arriving at a 186 IQ. The Mega Test has been criticized by professional psychologists as improperly designed and scored, "nothing short of number pulverization".[15]

Savant sees IQ tests as measurements of a variety of mental abilities and thinks intelligence entails so many factors that "attempts to measure it are useless".[16] She has held memberships with the high-IQ societies Mensa International and the Mega Society.[17]

"Ask Marilyn"

Following her listing in the 1986 Guinness Book of World Records, Parade ran a profile of her along with a selection of questions from Parade readers and her answers. Parade continued to get questions, so "Ask Marilyn" was made.

She uses her column to answer questions on many chiefly academic subjects; solve logical, mathematical or vocabulary puzzles posed by readers; answer requests for advice with logic; and give self-devised quizzes and puzzles. Aside from the weekly printed column, "Ask Marilyn" is a daily online column that adds to the printed version by resolving controversial answers, correcting mistakes, expanding answers, reposting previous answers, and solving additional questions. No new columns have been published online since October 30, 2022.[18]

Three of her books (Ask Marilyn, More Marilyn, and Of Course, I'm for Monogamy) are compilations of questions and answers from "Ask Marilyn". The Power of Logical Thinking includes many questions and answers from the column.

Famous columns

Monty Hall problem

Savant was asked the following question in her September 9, 1990, column:[19]

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you, "Do you want to pick door #2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

This question is called the Monty Hall problem due to its resembling scenarios on the game show Let's Make a Deal; its answer existed before it was used in "Ask Marilyn". She said the selection should be switched to door #2 because it has a 2⁄3 probability of success, while door #1 has just 1⁄3. To summarize, 2⁄3 of the time the opened door #3 will indicate the location of the door with the car (the door you had not picked and the one not opened by the host). Only 1⁄3 of the time will the opened door #3 mislead you into changing from the winning door to a losing door. These probabilities assume you change your choice each time door #3 is opened, and that the host always opens a door with a goat. This response provoked letters from thousands of readers, nearly all arguing doors #1 and #2 each have an equal chance of success. A follow-up column reaffirming her position served only to intensify the debate and soon became a feature article on the front page of The New York Times. Parade received around 10,000 letters from readers who thought that her workings were incorrect.[20]

Under the "standard" version of the problem, the host always opens a losing door and offers a switch. In the standard version, Savant's answer is correct. However, the statement of the problem as posed in her column is ambiguous.[21] The answer depends on what strategy the host is following. If the host operates under a strategy of offering a switch only if the initial guess is correct, it would clearly be disadvantageous to accept the offer. If the host merely selects a door at random, the question is likewise very different from the standard version. Savant addressed these issues by writing the following in Parade magazine, "the original answer defines certain conditions, the most significant of which is that the host always opens a losing door on purpose. Anything else is a different question."[22]

She expounded on her reasoning in a second follow-up and called on schoolteachers to show the problem to classes. In her final column on the problem, she gave the results of more than 1,000 school experiments. Most respondents now agree with her original solution, with half of the published letters declaring their authors had changed their minds.[23]

"Two boys" problem

Like the Monty Hall problem, the "two boys" or "second-sibling" problem predates Ask Marilyn, but generated controversy in the column,[24] first appearing there in 1991–1992 in the context of baby beagles:

A shopkeeper says she has two new baby beagles to show you, but she doesn't know whether they're male, female, or a pair. You tell her that you want only a male, and she telephones the fellow who's giving them a bath. "Is at least one a male?" she asks him. "Yes!" she informs you with a smile. What is the probability that the other one is a male?

When Savant replied "one out of three", readers[25] wrote the odds were 50–50. In a follow-up, she defended her answer, saying, "If we could shake a pair of puppies out of a cup the way we do dice, there are four ways they could land", in three of which at least one is male, but in only one of which none are male.

The confusion arises here because the bather is not asked if the puppy he is holding is a male, but rather if either is a male. If the puppies are labeled (A and B), each has a 50% chance of being male independently. This independence is restricted when at least A or B is male. Now, if A is not male, B must be male, and if B is not male, A must be male. This restriction is introduced by the way the question is structured and is easily overlooked – misleading people to the erroneous answer of 50%. See Boy or Girl paradox for solution details.

The problem re-emerged in 1996–97 with two cases juxtaposed:

Say that a woman and a man (who are unrelated) each have two children. We know that at least one of the woman's children is a boy and that the man's oldest child is a boy. Can you explain why the chances that the woman has two boys do not equal the chances that the man has two boys? My algebra teacher insists that the probability is greater that the man has two boys, but I think the chances may be the same. What do you think?

Savant agreed with the teacher, saying the chances were only 1 out of 3 that the woman had two boys, but 1 out of 2 the man had two boys. Readers argued for 1 out of 2 in both cases, prompting follow-ups. Finally, she began a survey, asking female readers with exactly two children, at least one of them male, to give the sex of both children. Of the 17,946 women who responded, 35.9%, about 1 in 3, had two boys.[26]

Woman has
young boy, older girl young girl, older boy 2 boys 2 girls
Probability: 1/3 1/3 1/3 0


Man has
young boy, older girl young girl, older boy 2 boys 2 girls
Probability: 0 1/2 1/2 0

Errors in the column

On January 22, 2012, Savant admitted to a mistake in her column. In the original column, published on December 25, 2011, a reader asked:

I manage a drug-testing program for an organization with 400 employees. Every three months, a random-number generator selects 100 names for testing. Afterward, these names go back into the selection pool. Obviously, the probability of an employee being chosen in one quarter is 25 percent. But what is the likelihood of being chosen over the course of a year?

Her response was:

The probability remains 25 percent, despite the repeated testing. One might think that as the number of tests grows, the likelihood of being chosen increases, but as long as the size of the pool remains the same, so does the probability. Goes against your intuition, doesn't it?

Her answer is incorrect. Each time the random-number generator runs, the employee's chance of being selected is 25%, but the probability of being chosen at least once across the 4 events is higher. In this case, the correct answer is around 68%, calculated as the complement of the probability of not being chosen in any of the four quarters: 1 – (0.754).[27]

On June 22, 2014, Savant made an error in a word problem. The question was: "If two people could complete a project in six hours, how long would it take each of them to do identical projects on their own, given that one took four hours longer than the other?" Her answer was 10 hours and 14 hours, reasoning that if together it took them 6 hours to complete a project, then the total effort was 12 "man hours". If they then each do a separate full project, the total effort needed would be 24 hours, so the answer (10+14) needed to add up to 24 with a difference of 4.[28] Savant later issued a correction, as the answer ignored the fact that the two people get different amounts of work done per hour: if they are working jointly on a project, they can maximize their combined productivity, but if they split the work in half, one person will finish sooner and cannot fully contribute. This subtlety causes the problem to require solving a quadratic equation and does not have a rational solution. Instead, the answer is (approximately 10.32) and (approximately 14.32) hours.[29]

Fermat's Last Theorem

A few months after Andrew Wiles said he had proved Fermat's Last Theorem, Savant published the book The World's Most Famous Math Problem (October 1993),[30] which surveys the history of Fermat's Last Theorem as well as other mathematical problems. Reviewers questioned her criticism of Wiles' proof, asking whether it was based on a correct understanding of mathematical induction, proof by contradiction, and imaginary numbers.[31]

Especially contested was Savant's statement that Wiles' proof should be rejected for its use of non-Euclidean geometry. Savant stated that because "the chain of proof is based in hyperbolic (Lobachevskian) geometry", and because squaring the circle is seen as a "famous impossibility" despite being possible in hyperbolic geometry, then "if we reject a hyperbolic method of squaring the circle, we should also reject a hyperbolic proof of Fermat's last theorem."

Specialists flagged discrepancies between the two cases, distinguishing the use of hyperbolic geometry as a tool for proving Fermat's Last Theorem from its use as a setting for squaring the circle: squaring the circle in hyperbolic geometry is a different problem from that of squaring it in Euclidean geometry, whereas Fermat's Last Theorem is not inherently geometry specific. Savant was criticized for rejecting hyperbolic geometry as a satisfactory basis for Wiles' proof, with critics pointing out that axiomatic set theory (rather than Euclidean geometry) is now the accepted foundation of mathematical proofs and that set theory is sufficiently robust to encompass both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry as well as geometry and adding numbers.

Savant retracted the argument in a July 1995 addendum, saying she saw the theorem as "an intellectual challenge – 'to find another proof using only tools available to Fermat in the 17th century.'"

The book came with a glowing introduction by Martin Gardner, which had been based on an earlier draft of the book that did not contain any of the contentious views.[31]

Publications

  • 1985 – Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest
  • 1990 – Brain Building: Exercising Yourself Smarter (co-written with Leonore Fleischer)
  • 1992 – Ask Marilyn: Answers to America's Most Frequently Asked Questions
  • 1993 – The World's Most Famous Math Problem: The Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and Other Mathematical Mysteries
  • 1994 – More Marilyn: Some Like It Bright!
  • 1994 – "I've Forgotten Everything I Learned in School!": A Refresher Course to Help You Reclaim Your Education
  • 1996 – Of Course I'm for Monogamy: I'm Also for Everlasting Peace and an End to Taxes
  • 1996 – The Power of Logical Thinking: Easy Lessons in the Art of Reasoning...and Hard Facts about Its Absence in Our Lives
  • 2000 – The Art of Spelling: The Madness and the Method
  • 2002 – Growing Up: A Classic American Childhood

References

  1. 1 2 "MILESTONES: August 11 birthdays for Viola Davis, Tomi Lahren, Joe Rogan". Brooklyn Eagle. August 11, 2020. Retrieved October 3, 2020.
  2. ↑ LLC, New York Media (February 6, 1989). "New York Magazine". New York Media, LLC. Retrieved July 24, 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Knight, Sam (April 10, 2009). "Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing?". Financial Times. Financial Times Ltd. Archived from the original on December 10, 2022. Retrieved October 7, 2013.
  4. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn (November 25, 2007). "Ask Marilyn". Parade. Archived from the original on April 23, 2008.
  5. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn (January 23, 2008). "Keeping It in the Family". Parade.
  6. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn (May 4, 2013). "Ask Marilyn: The 'First Sandwich Generation': True Trend or Marketing Invention?". Parade. Retrieved August 15, 2013.
  7. 1 2 3 Baumgold, Julie (February 6, 1989). "In the Kingdom of the Brain". New York Magazine. New York Media, LLC.
  8. ↑ Vitez, Michael (October 12, 1988). "Two of a Kind". The Chicago Tribune.
  9. ↑ "Love Stories We Love". Parade: Entertainment, Recipes, Health, Life, Holidays. February 6, 2015. Retrieved February 6, 2022. Vos Savant and Jarvik were married Aug. 23, 1987, a year to the day after they first met, at New York's Plaza Hotel. They wore rings the groom made of gold and pyrolitic carbon, a substance used in artificial heart valves. Isaac Asimov walked the bride down the aisle; the best man was Tom Gaidosh, the seventh recipient of the Jarvik 7 artificial heart.
  10. ↑ McCleary, Kathleen (September 11, 2018). "Marilyn's Rules for a Happy Marriage". Parade: Entertainment, Recipes, Health, Life, Holidays. Retrieved February 6, 2022.
  11. ↑ "About – National Women's History Museum – NWHM". Retrieved February 19, 2016.
  12. ↑ "CSI Fellows and Staff". Center for Inquiry. Retrieved June 20, 2012.
  13. ↑ "Ask Marilyn Stream". Parade: Entertainment, Recipes, Health, Life, Holidays. October 23, 2022.
  14. ↑ Knight, Sam (April 10, 2009). "Is a high IQ a burden as much as a blessing?". Financial Times. Financial Times Ltd. Castles, Elaine E. (June 6, 2012). Inventing Intelligence. ABC-CLIO. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-4408-0338-3. Retrieved August 31, 2013. And what is that makes Marilyn vos Savant so uniquely qualified to answer such questions? There is only one reason: she is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest IQ ever recorded. Never mind that this record is based on a non-standardized test put out by an obscure group known as Mega, supposedly the world's most selective organization of geniuses. Ignore the fact that test scores at the extreme ends of any distribution are notoriously unreliable. . . . None of this is meant to downplay her very real accomplishments; by all accounts, vos Savant is a sensible and grounded woman, and she has won several awards for her work in the fields of education and communications. But her fame came, in the words of journalist Julie Baumgold, 'only because of the glory of that number.' (citing New York magazine 22 (1989):36–42)
  15. ↑ Carlson, Roger D. (1991). Keyser, Daniel J.; Sweetland, Richard C. (eds.). Test Critiques (Volume VIII ed.). PRO-ED. pp. 431–435. ISBN 0-89079-254-2. Although the approach that Hoeflin takes is interesting, it violates good psychometric principles by overinterpreting the weak data of a self-selected sample. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  16. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn (July 17, 2005). "Ask Marilyn: Are Men Smarter Than Women?". Parade. Archived from the original on October 11, 2007. Retrieved February 25, 2008.
  17. ↑ Thompson, D. (July 5, 1986). "Marilyn's Most Vital Statistic". The Courier-Mail.
  18. ↑ Ask Marilyn column archive on Parade Magazine
  19. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn. "Game Show Problem". marilynvossavant.com. Archived from the original on March 10, 2010. Retrieved August 7, 2010.
  20. ↑ Tierney, John (July 21, 1991). "Behind Monty Hall's Doors: Puzzle, Debate and Answer?". The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2008.
  21. ↑ Krauss, Stefan and Wang, X. T. (2003). "The Psychology of the Monty Hall Problem: Discovering Psychological Mechanisms for Solving a Tenacious Brain Teaser", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 132(1). Retrieved from "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 30, 2009. Retrieved May 30, 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  22. ↑ "Game Show Problem". marilynvossavant.com. Archived from the original on March 10, 2010. Retrieved June 2, 2008.
  23. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn (1992). "Ask Marilyn". Parade.
  24. ↑ The problem appeared in Ask Marilyn on October 13, 1991 with a follow-up on January 5, 1992 (initially involving two baby beagles instead of two children), and then on May 26, 1996, with follow-ups on December 1, 1996, March 30, 1997, July 20, 1997, and October 19, 1997.
  25. ↑ vos Savant, Marilyn (1996). The Power of Logical Thinking. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 19–21. ISBN 9780312156275. OCLC 255578248. Retrieved September 1, 2016.
  26. ↑ Stansfield, William D.; Carlton, Matthew A. (February 2009). "The Most Widely Publicized Gender Problem in Human Genetics". Human Biology. 81 (1): 3–11. doi:10.3378/027.081.0101. PMID 19589015. S2CID 29611617. Retrieved April 7, 2013. Some readers doubted her 1/3 solution, so she asked for data from her women readers "with two children (no more), at least one of which is a boy (either child or both of them)." She got 17,946 responses by letters and e-mails. Without reporting the sex ratio in the sample, she says about 35.9% of respondents ("about 1 in 3") said they have two boys.
  27. ↑ Ask Marilyn: Did Marilyn Make a Mistake on Drug Testing?. Parade, 22 January 2012. Retrieved 24 January 2012.
  28. ↑ "Marilyn vos Savant • View topic – Unequal Work". Archived from the original on July 22, 2017. Retrieved February 19, 2016.
  29. ↑ Marilyn vos Savant (July 14, 2014). "The Correct Solution to the Brad-and-Angelina Math Problem". Parade. Retrieved February 19, 2016.
  30. ↑ Fermat's Last Theorem and Wiles' proof were discussed in her Parade column of November 21, 1993, which introduced the book.
  31. 1 2 Boston, Nigel; Granville, Andrew (May 1995). "Review of The World's Most Famous Math Problem" (.PDF). American Mathematical Monthly. The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 102, No. 5. 102 (5): 470–473. doi:10.2307/2975048. JSTOR 2975048. Retrieved February 25, 2008.
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