Rather like the titular character in 1997 movie Good Will Hunting, Langan didn’t choose an academic career instead, he worked as a doorman and developed his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe during his downtime. Langan attended Montana State University but dropped out. At high school, according to Langan, he tutored himself in “advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all that.” What’s more, he allegedly got 100 percent on his SAT test, even though he slept through some of it.
By the time he turned four, he’d already taught himself how to read. Christopher Langanīorn in San Francisco in 1952, self-educated Christopher Langan is a special kind of genius. He launched the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2003 and founded space transport company Stratolaunch Systems in 2011. As well as being a stakeholder in technology, media and other companies, Allen owns the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trailblazers and part-owns MLS team the Seattle Sounders.
He is a renowned philanthropist, and his donations to science, education, conservation, the arts and technology exceed $1.5 billion. After he was told that he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982, Allen stepped back from Microsoft and eventually resigned in 2000, although he remained in an advisory capacity. The following year, the pair founded Microsoft in New Mexico. He attended Washington State University but quit his studies in 1974 and then talked Gates into leaving Harvard. Allen was born in 1953 in Seattle and made friends with Bill Gates while still at school. Paul Allenīillionaire Paul Allen reportedly has an IQ of between 160 and 170. Following this fine tradition, we take a look at 30 of the smartest people alive today – including brilliantly accomplished academics, former child prodigies, IQ whizzes, and super sharp young intellectuals with their whole lives ahead of them. Individuals like Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein all had groundbreaking ideas that have lived on long after their deaths. History is peppered with influential geniuses who changed the world.