A four-year-old girl has been accepted into Mensa with an IQ almost as high as Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.u00a0Brainy Heidi Hankins &mdash; who hasn&rsquo;t even started school yet &mdash; sat an IQ test after staff at her nursery said she was so intelligent they were struggling to find activities to challenge her. <img alt="" src="/imagedata/2012/apr/study_1.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 416px; " /> A little bit special: Four-year-old Heidi Hankins has an IQ of 159, just one point below Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein The exceptional youngster impressed examiners with a impressive score of 159. The average score for an adult is 100 and for &lsquo;gifted&rsquo; individuals is 130. She is only slightly behind scientist Stephen Hawking and legendary physicist Albert Einstein both with IQs of160. What Heidi can do Heidi &mdash; who can already add, subtract, draw figures and write in sentences &mdash; was reading books for seven-year-olds when she was just two. The test she took, is specifically designed for children her age and contains a mixture of problem-solving puzzles and word games. Heidi&rsquo;s father, Matthew, hopes she can now skip a school year to ensure she is adequately challenged. The University of Southampton public health lecturer, said, &ldquo;We always thought Heidi was bright because she was reading early. I was curious about her IQ and the results were off the scale. I got her the complete set of the Oxford Reading Tree books when she was two and she read through the whole set of 30 in about an hour. It&rsquo;s what you would expect a seven-year-old to do.&rdquo; &ldquo;She was using full sentences almost as soon as she started to speak and then taught herself to read using the computer aged 18 months,&rdquo; he added. He further said, &ldquo;She is not precocious, she is just a little girl who likes her Barbies and Lego but then you will find her sitting down and reading a book. We don&rsquo;t push Heidi at all. She has taken up everything herself and teaches herself.&rdquo;u00a0John Stevenage, chief executive of British Mensa, said, &ldquo;Heidi&rsquo;s parents correctly identified that she shows great potential. We wish them well and are pleased that they have chosen to join the Mensa network for support.&rdquo; Mensa said Heidi&rsquo;s IQ is unlikely to change as she gets older. What is Mensa? Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It is a non-profit organisation open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardised, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test. Did you know? Hollywood actress Sharon Stone has an IQ of 154. Shakira, the Columbian singer is also a &lsquo;gifted individual&rsquo; with an IQ of 140.u00a0

Heidi Hankins, assessed with an IQ almost as high as physicist Stephen Hawking, stunned examiners with her extraordinary intelligence

Four-year-old 'genius' girl joins Mensa

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Four-year-old 'genius' girl joins Mensa

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