Brainy three-year-old girl becomes the youngest new member of Mensa

A brainy three-year-old has been unveiled as the youngest new member of Mensa - with a higher IQ than Stephen Hawking.

Clever Alice Amos has been granted full membership of the brain box society after scoring an incredible 162 on an IQ test - she took in Russian.

Her parents are from Russia and speak the language at home in Guildford, Surrey.

The whizzkid, one of just 18 pre-school members of Mensa, is now officially recognised as smarter than Prof Hawking whose IQ is a reputed 160.

Alice's admission to the elite IQ club in January means she is in the top one per cent of the population of the world.

She beats maths whizz Carol Vorderman by eight points.

Mr Amos, a telecom sales manager, said: "Alice was actually a little slow when it came to speaking for the first time, but then we realised that she was making some really big leaps, especially in her reading.

"She was picking up numbers and learning maths very quickly and by the time she was two years and nine months old she had finished a whole book series that is aimed at children aged four to five years old.

"She often teaches things to her younger sister, Katie, aged 18 months, who learns by copying her.

"We realised that she was hungry to learn more all of the time and she could count to 100 already and was reading Aesop's Fables and levels 4 and 6 of the Oxford Reading Tree."

Her IQ of 162 ranks her higher than a list of the world's greatest luminaries - dead and living.

Former US presidents Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and Bill Clinton could only muster 128, 160 and 137 respectively.

Napoleon Bonaparte scored 145 and Sigmund Freud was still left trailing in the wake of Alice with a score of 156.

There are more than 1,000 members of Mensa aged under 18.

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