Adhara Pérez Is the 8-Year-Old Genius Who Has An IQ Higher Than Stephen Hawking and Wants To Colonize Mars
Adhara Pérez is not your average eight-year-old. She doesn’t have many friends. She dreams of traveling to space as an astronaut. Oh, and she has an IQ of 162–two points higher than both Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. Adhara Pérez is so intelligent that she has finished elementary, middle, and high school. She is currently working on two college degrees.
Adhara Pérez was born in the modest area of Tláhuac, Mexico. From a young age, Adhara’s mother, Nallely Sánchez, says that she knew that her daughter was different.
“She played with blocks, placing them all in rows, and constantly rocked while she ate in her highchair. She could spend hours like that,” said her mother in an interview with Infobae Mexico. When Adhara was just 3 years old, doctors told Nallely that her daughter was on the autism spectrum (what was previously called Aspereger’s syndrome).
People with Aspereger’s typically have difficulty with social interactions and nonverbal communication. They can also have obsessive and repetitive behaviors, like Adhara placing all of her toy blocks in a row or rocking constantly.
Unfortunately, Adhara Pérez’s teachers did not see her intelligence. Instead, she was often punished for her disinterest in her studies.
“When she was in school, they sent me messages [to tell me] that she was falling asleep. That she was apathetic,” Nallely told Infobae. “But at home, I saw that she knew the periodic table of elements. Since I was little, she knew algebra. I think she felt bored.”
To make matters worse, Adhara was often bullied by other students. She was ostracized and called names like rara (weirdo) by the other kids. Nallely said her daughter was becoming depressed. To keep her daughter from “suffering”, Nallely took Adhara out of traditional schooling and put her in therapy. It was at therapy that a psychiatrist told Nallely to take her daughter to Talent Care Centre so she could be evaluated. It was there that experts discovered her unusually high IQ–162. You only have to have an IQ of 130 to be considered gifted.
After the discovery of her genius IQ, Adhara took distance courses to graduate from elementary school, middle school, and then high school. She is now pursuing two college degrees.
Adhara is studying Industrial Engineering at CNCI and gravitational waves and astronomy at the Astronomy Institute of UNAM. She has dreams of studying Astrophysics at the University of Arizona and is currently studying English so she can one day attend. Eventually, she wants to work for NASA and become an astronaut.
As Nallely Sánchez explained to InfoBae: “[Children with Aspereger’s] do want to have friends, but I feel like they don’t know how [to make them]. It seems that they are in a world that they create. And they could spend all day talking about what they like, like dinosaurs. In the case of Adhara, her world is space.”
Adhara’s biggest dream of all? “I want to go to space to colonize Mars,” she told Infobae.