Marilyn vos Savant
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Marilyn vos Savant (born August 11, 1946) is an American newspaper columnist who deals with mathematical and logical puzzles, as well as more traditional self-help advice and requests for her opinion. Her column Ask Marilyn appears in Parade magazine, and she has based two books on it. Her last name "vos Savant" is her mother's maiden name.
Her fame stems almost entirely from her childhood IQ of 228, which was claimed to be the world's highest until 2003, when Sho Yano took the title with a figure impossible to estimate accurately, but above 228. Her adult IQ has been estimated to be 180 using more modern techniques than were available in the 1960s.
Among mathematicians, vos Savant is best known for popularizing the Monty Hall problem, a probabilistic conundrum concerning the game-show host of that name. Its solution is not obvious and has led to some disagreement even in the mathematical field.
However, many mathematicians criticized her argument, in the book The World's Most Famous Math Problem, that Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem was invalid because it used non-Euclidean geometry, which she does not accept.[1] (http://www.wiskit.com/marilyn/fermat.html) In addition, she seems to have incorrectly made a connection between elliptic curves (which the proof uses) and elliptic geometry (a non-Euclidean geometry - in which she doesn't believe).
As of 2004, vos Savant is the Chief Financial Officer for Jarvik Hearts, Inc. Her husband is Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik-7 and Jarvik 2000 artificial hearts.
External links
- Ask Marilyn Online (http://www.marilynvossavant.com/)
- Marilyn is Wrong! (http://www.wiskit.com/marilyn/marilyn.html)--a web site that finds flaws in some of vos Savant's columns