2-year-old joins Mensasociety, IQ of 156

She is in the top 0.2 percent for her age
Updated: Monday, 04 May 2009, 8:32 AM EDT

By LILY FU, Special Contributor

EDMONTON, Britain - Mensa, the society for geniuses, has accepted its youngest member -- a 2-year-old.
Elise Tan Roberts from Edmonton, North London in Britain has an IQ of 156. Albert Einstein was believed to have an IQ of 160. The average IQ is 100. Elise can name 35 capital cities, identify the three types of triangle and recite the alphabet, according to the Times of London .
Mensa normally only accepts children 10 or older, but the society made an exception for Elise because she tested so high on the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale. She is in the top 0.2 percent for her age.

Elise's mother Louise Tan Roberts said she and her husband, Edward, haven't done anything special. They simply answer her questions and encourage her to learn.
"It's nothing to do with me," Louise told the Mirror.co.uk . "She just says things and you have no idea where she got it from. I don't set out to teach her loads of stuff, she just enjoys learning and picks things up. She's always on the go, she never stops."
Edward, a car buyer and motor consultant, hopes to encourage her to continue to learn fast.
"We don't want to make her have to dumb down and stop learning just to fit in. But she's still my baby. I just want her to be happy and enjoy herself."

Recently an American 6-year-old boy scored a 176 on his IQ test . Pranav Veera can recite the names of U.S. presidents in the order they served in office and can say the alphabet backwards. One person in a million has an IQ above 176.

Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, and Dr. Lancelot Ware, a British scientist and lawyer, founded Mensa in the United Kingdom in 1946. They had the idea of forming a society for bright people, the only qualification for membership being a high IQ.[4] It was to be free from all social distinctions (racial, religious, etc.), represented by the name of the organization, which comes from the Latin mensa, which means "table", indicating that it is a round-table society of equals. Mensa also was to be a non-political organization, reflected in its constitution: "Mensa encompasses members representing many points of view. Consequently, Mensa as an organization shall not express an opinion as being that of Mensa, take any political action other than the publication of the results of its investigations, or have any ideological, philosophical, political, or religious affiliations."

Mensa International consists of more than 110,000 members in 50 national groups. Individuals who live in a country with a national group join the national group, while those living in countries without a recognised chapter may join Mensa International directly. The two largest national groups are American Mensa, with more than 56,000 members, and British Mensa, with about 23,500 members.[5] Larger national groups are further subdivided into local groups. For example, American Mensa has 134 local groups, with the largest having over 2,000 members and the smallest having fewer than 100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International