🇬🇧 Heidi Hankins

Heidi Hankins was born in 2008. Her father, Matthew Hankins, was a research fellow at the University of Southampton specialising in artificial intelligence — a field in which the gap between intelligence the measurement and intelligence the experience is a daily preoccupation. Her mother, Sophy, was a primary-school art teacher. The combination produced, in their daughter, an unusually visual cognitive style: Heidi drew before she walked, and she taught herself to read in part by pointing to the letters in her favourite illustrated books.

By eighteen months, she had a vocabulary of more than a hundred words. By two, she was reading entire stories aloud, including some Roald Dahl. By three, she was working with phonetics and short multiplication. Her father — who, owing to his profession, was professionally sceptical of single test scores — initially declined the educational psychologist's recommendation that she be tested. He changed his mind only when he realised that without the verified score, the British educational system was going to refuse to accelerate her placement.

She sat the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence and tested at 159. The score is at the 99.99th percentile of the population. Mensa accepted her on the basis of the verified assessment. The British press, predictably, picked the most attention-grabbing comparison they could find — Einstein, whose IQ was never formally tested but whose oft-quoted estimated score is 160 — and used it as the headline.

Matthew Hankins, professionally trained to be careful about exactly this kind of inference, gave a quietly devastating interview to The Times. "It is not a score that predicts the future," he said. "It is a score that opens doors in the present." The line is now widely circulated in gifted-and-talented policy literature. He went on to describe the specific door he hoped it would open: appropriate educational placement for a four-year-old who could not be challenged in a normal Reception class.

The school the family chose was Winchester College's preparatory school, with significant home enrichment. Heidi pursued mathematics, languages, and art. Her parents — like the Wrigleys, like the Kirbys — declined further press appearances after the initial cycle. The family appears in occasional Sunday-paper retrospectives of British gifted children, but Heidi herself has remained out of public view. She is reported, in her teens, to have moved into senior-school mathematics and visual art at advanced levels.

Heidi Hankins's significance, beyond the personal verification of an extraordinary cognitive measurement, is the example her father has set for how to talk about prodigy IQ in public. He is a researcher in machine intelligence. He understands, professionally, that a single number is not a person. He has insisted, quietly and repeatedly, that the number be used to open a school door and then put away. The country's gifted-education community has been listening.