IQ Award

The IQ Award is a prize donated by the high-IQ association Mensa to honor people and organisations who have done remarkable contributions to public welfare by an intelligent idea, scientific research about human intelligence or the positive image of intelligence in the public.^[1] Candidates can be nominated by anyone and after being checked by an internal commission, all Mensa members can vote for which nominee to win the award.

History

The German IQ Award is held annually since 2004. The winners are:

• 2004: Albrecht Beutelspacher for his Mathematikum
• 2005: Günther Jauch for his TV show "Der Große IQ-Test" (The big IQ test)
• 2006: Die Sendung mit der Maus, a children's TV series
• 2007: Ranga Yogeshwar, a German TV host
• 2008: Dieter Nuhr, a Comedian
• 2009: Harald Lesch, an astrophysicist and TV host
• 2010: Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German issue of Scientific American

Since 2011 the award is issued in the two categories "Wissenschaft/Innovation" (Science/Innovation) and "Kultur/Medien" (Culture/Media):

• 2011: Heatball and Richard David Precht
• 2012: Eckart von Hirschhausen and due to the same number of votes Franz Porzsolt and Florian Freistetter for ScienceBlogs
• 2013: Auticon
• 2014: Jonny Lee Miller. While Edward Snowden had been nominated by Mensa members, and the IQ commission had approved his nomination, the managing board of Mensa threatened the IQ commission to subdue Snowden's nomination, so that the Mensa members were not able to vote for him. This caused a big controversy among the members, but the board did not change the vote.^[2] As a consequence, the opposing members agreed to vote for Miller as the most nonsensical candidate.

References

1. "Was ist der Deutsche IQ-Preis? (What is the German IQ Award?)". Mensa in Deutschland e.V. Retrieved 22 January 2015.
2. Felix Werdermann (21 January 2015). "Kein IQ-Preis für Edward Snowden (No IQ Award for Edward Snowden)". der Freitag. Retrieved 22 January 2015.