When asked who is the most intelligent person alive, the one with the highest IQ, most people will say Stephen Hawking. In fact, the Chinese-Australian Terence Tao is the person with the highest IQ in the world at present. 

With an outstanding IQ of 230, Terence Tao was born on July 17, 1975 in Adelaide, Australia. He was regarded as a child prodigy as claimed by educational researcher Miraca Gross while researching gifted children.

Terence Tao joined the South Australian Association for the Gifted. At the age of 7, having taught himself the programming language BASIC (by reading a manual), he had written several computer programs on mathematics problems.

When he was 24, Terence Tao was promoted to professor at UCLA and remains the youngest person ever appointed professor by the institution; he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship when he was 31.

Dubbed the "Mozart of Math," Terence Tao, made history in 2006 by becoming the first UCLA faculty member to win the prestigious Fields Medal, often described as the "Nobel Prize in mathematics."

The mathematician Terence Tao, of the University of California, Los Angeles, has presented a solution to an 80-year-old number theory problem posed by the legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős.

Terence Tao's father was born and raised in Shanghai, and his mother came from Guangdong. His parents were emmigrated from Hong Kong to Australia.