Maximillian Kaizen's Profile

Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed"

The palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould claimed in The Mismeasure of Man in 1981 that general intelligence was simply a mathematical artefact and that its use was unscientific and culturally and socially discriminatory. Howard Gardner at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been arguing - controversially - for more than 25 years that cognitive capacity is best understood in terms of multiple intelligences, covering mathematical, verbal, visual-spatial, physiological, naturalistic, self-reflective, social and musical aptitudes.

In 2005, then-president of Harvard Lawrence Summers incited outrage by stating that the reason why fewer women succeed in mathematics was an innate gender difference. This statement inspired three Cornell scientists, led by Stephen Ceci, to get to work. In a recent article published in the Psychological Bulletin, they found that it was a variety of factors, none of them physiological, which kept women from pursuing mathematically intensive careers.

The researchers found among students who exhibit high math ability the girls also excel verbally while the boys don't, which means the girls have more options. Ceci says that it comes down to the fact that "a female is more likely to find medical research---finding a cure for a disease---more personally fulfilling than developing an internet search algorithm." On the one hand, Ceci and his team have good evidence that women are no less able than men to excel in mathematics.