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Leeds Live
Leeds Live
National
Sebastian McCormick

Leeds boy, 10, a officially a 'genius' with IQ higher than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking

A Leeds 10-year-old has passed a Mensa IQ test and received a score of 162 at genius level.

Yusuf Shah, from Moortown, has been good at maths from an early age, according to his father, Irfan Shah. When he was in year three he discovered a trick for squaring numbers.

Simply by observing the numbers, he figured out that if you times together the two numbers either side of a number you square, it will always equal one below the result of squaring the middle number. For example, if you square eight you get 64, and if you times nine and seven together you get 63.

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This was just one example of Yusuf's talent and he continued to excel at school. Irfan said: "Even in nursery we just noticed that he was doing the alphabet and things quicker than other children but you just thought some kids may pick up the ABCs a bit quicker.

He added: "So, he just has this natural flair for maths and I guess that's when we sort of realised. Even his school teachers, every time we get school reports they're amazing, they say there's nothing for us to teach."

He's also very talented at completing puzzles like a Rubik's Cube, which he solved by himself without any outside help.

Yusuf then went to take a Mensa test once he reached the required age of ten and a half. He took the test and it returned with an IQ score of 162.

For reference, both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking were estimated to have an IQ of around 160.

Now he's in year 6 and his father is hoping he gets into a specialist private school. When he took two tests to see if he'd get in he got a score of 80/80 on one and 78/80 on the other.

Yusuf's father says his real passion, however, is maths. He said: "He loves maths. If you ask him [what he wants to do in the future], he'll just say I want to do maths."

He knows about Oxford and Cambridge as two of the top universities, but he is still young and has not yet settled on anything yet. Irfan said: "His first passion is maths and he always says 'I want to do maths, I want to go to Oxford or Cambridge and study maths'.

"I say you just keep working hard and anything's possible. Recently, he says 'you never know, I could even be Prime Minister'."

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