This 72-year-old is officially the smartest man in the world, but you'd never think it considering what he does for a living
Imagine the most intelligent man in the world. Now you are probably wondering if there is a person alive who can claim to be the smartest in the world?
Born into poverty, Christopher Langan showed high intelligence from an early age. In fact, he has one of the highest IQs ever recorded, somewhere between 190 and 210.
But Langan doesn't spend his days teaching at a university or overseeing national laboratories. Instead, the "smartest man in the world" makes a quiet living as a horse breeder, the Telegraph reports.
Born on March 25, 1952, Christopher Michael Langan showed signs of above average intelligence from an early age. He spoke when he was only 6 months old, and he started reading when he was 3 years old.
When he turned five, Langan even began to question the existence of God. "It just turned out that I was a child genius," he says.
"My schoolmates saw me as the teacher's pet, a little ugly."
However, he was not a happy child, given that he experienced abuse from his mother's boyfriend, who regularly beat him and his two half-siblings.
"Life with him was like ten years in an army boot camp," Langan recalls, "but in a boot camp you don't get beaten with a garrison belt every day and the army doesn't have that extreme poverty."
Chris Langan's family was extremely poor, leaving him and his brother to fend for themselves on many occasions.
With a reported IQ of between 195 and 210, Chris Langan may be the smartest person in the world, despite dropping out of college and working as a farmer.
"To this day, I have never met anyone who suffered from childhood poverty like my family. We didn't have a matching pair of socks and our shoes were full of holes. We always wear the same clothes. "I remember me and my brothers stripping because we had nothing else to wear," Chris said.
Despite such misfortunes, Chris Langan continued to excel academically. By the time he was 12, he had learned everything his public school could teach him and was beginning to spend time on independent study. Even then, he showed signs that he might one day become “the smartest person in the world.”
"I took advanced math, physics, philosophy, Latin and Greek, all of that," recalls Langan, who could learn a language just by flipping through a textbook. He even got a perfect score on the test, even though he fell asleep during the test.
He also started working. And when Jack, his stepfather, tried to attack him one morning when he was 14, Chris fought back - by kicking Jack out of the house for good.
Soon Christopher Langan prepared to go to college. But he would soon discover that intelligence did not always translate to success in the real world.
Christopher Langan went to Reed College hoping to study mathematics and philosophy. But when his mother didn't sign the form securing a full scholarship, he gave up.
He then went to Montana State, but only for a short time. Langan later said he got into a fight with a math teacher.
"I realized that I was being taught by people I could be a teacher for," he said.
So he dropped out of college and went East to work as a cowboy, construction worker, firefighter, fitness trainer and security guard.
When he was in his 40s, he earned just $6000 a year.
"On the one hand you're an ordinary guy," he told foreign media. "You go to work, you do your job, you're polite and kind. On the other hand, you come home and you start counting. You retreat into your own world and make it work in your favor."
But the mind of the “smartest person in the world” continued to function. In his spare time, Christopher Langan tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe by developing a “theory of everything.” He calls it the cognitive-theoretical model of the universe.
"It includes physics and natural sciences, but it also goes to a higher level. The level at which you can talk about all of science," Langan explained, noting that CTMU could prove the existence of God.
However, "the smartest man in the world" doubts it will ever be read, published or taken seriously. He thinks his lack of academic credentials will continue to hold him back.
Although a 2020 investigation found that Christopher Langan had an IQ between 195 and 210 (the average intelligence quotient is around 100), which would have given him one of the highest IQs in the world, the "smartest man in the world" continues to live a quiet life.
Today, he and his wife spend their days on a horse farm in Missouri. "Nobody knows anything about my IQ because I don't tell them," Langan explained.
But he kept his mind — and the minds of others — active. Christopher Langan and his wife founded the Meega Foundation in 1999, a nonprofit organization for people with high IQs to share ideas outside of academia.
Langan is a truth teller and believes in many conspiracy theories.
But how does he view his great intelligence? For him, it's like everything in life - we're all lucky and we're all born with something of our own, and the "smartest person in the world" just happened to be gifted with a brilliant mind.
"Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be ordinary," he says. "Not that I would change anything. I just wonder sometimes." /Telegraph/
