🇬🇧 Tara Sharifi

Tara Sharifi was born in 2006 to Iranian-British parents in Aylesbury, a market town in Buckinghamshire. Her father, an academic, and her mother, an educator, were deeply invested in their daughter's education from the start. Tara attended Aylesbury High School — a selective grammar school — having earlier sailed through her 11-plus examinations at the top of her year.

Her route to the Mensa test was straightforward: she had impressed her teachers, the family decided to verify the assessment with a formal instrument, and they booked the test. The Cattell III B paper is what Mensa uses for British children aged ten and above. The maximum measurable score on the instrument is 162. Tara reached the ceiling.

The score was, technically, identical to the maximum the test could measure. The proper statistical interpretation is that her actual IQ might be higher — the instrument cannot, by design, distinguish above 162 — and that, at worst, she is at the 99.99th percentile of the population. The British press, predictably, ran the headline that she had outscored Einstein. The fact that Einstein was never formally tested did not, by 2017, slow anyone down.

Her mother, in a careful interview with The Independent, redirected attention away from the comparison. "The score is interesting," she said. "What's more interesting is what Tara does with it. She wants to be a maths professor. She wants to write novels. She wants to live in Iran for a year and learn the proper Farsi grammar. The score is just one tool." The family declined most television offers.

Tara has, since 2017, pursued a more or less ordinary high-achieving British schooling. She has competed in mathematics olympiads at national level. She has studied multiple languages — English, French, Farsi, and the beginnings of Latin and Mandarin. She has played the violin. She has avoided the celebrity trap that swallowed many high-IQ children of previous generations.

The Iranian-British community in the United Kingdom has historically produced a remarkable proportion of high-achievers in mathematics and the sciences — a sociology that Iranian diaspora studies have explored and the British educational system has, very slowly, learned to support. Tara Sharifi is part of that broader story. Her score is the most-quoted single number to come out of the Iranian-British community in the 21st century. The use she makes of it will continue to matter long after the score itself is forgotten.