Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
Comment by hiAndrewQuinn 8 hours ago
>Does that mean the 145 figure is only a guess on your end ?
EDIT: Mea maxima culpa, confusion crept in, my 145 number was supposed to be a much looser guess for actual working full time mathematicians. I miswrote this in the original post as applying to math PhD students, which are much lower. Closer to a 130 median.
ORIGINAL: It's not quite a guess, but I don't have precise data on this exact thing either. Previous studies in this field have consistently found a range of between 140 and 150, and you can probably find those with some Googling if you want to corroborate it yourself. I have a long cached memory of seeing a study where theoretical physics PhD students had an average IQ of 150, which also loosely supports this, since theoretical physics is almost its own form of pure mathematics.
>an individual's IQ is not something set in stone, and can absolutely be improved with training
Most psychological research I've seen says no such thing, unfortunately. Believe me, I would love for that to be the case - one extra point of IQ correlates to roughly $1000 extra income per year in the US, and so if your 20 point claim were really true we could potentially cause a double digit spike in GDP over the next few months just by implementing it in smart ways. But my baseline belief is that study is almost certainly an outlier in a sea of similar studies which support the null hypothesis.
Did a Google search, and the only actual, definitive thing I found was this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5008436/#tbl1
Note that it's an IQ of 128 vs 125 for humanities. With the small sample size, it's basically noise. And given that this is Oxford, I would expect the average PhD student to have less than these numbers.