Meet the 12-year-old with a higher IQ than Einstein

A twelve-year-old girl has outwitted Einstein and Steven Hawking to ace a test designed to challenge the world's most brilliant minds.  Lydia Sebastian, from Essex in the UK, achieved the maximum score in Mensa’s Cattell III B test, scoring 162 - the maximum score for students aged under 18 - and finishing the test with minutes to spare.

Lydia Sebastian takes IQ test and scores higher than Stephe... http://t.co/FgHaKBU2sq | https://t.co/apGmzF9vUw pic.twitter.com/MrZcgIefRw

— Nicole Williams (@NcoleWilliams) September 3, 2015

"At first, I was really nervous but once I started, it was much easier than I expected it to be and then I relaxed," she told The Guardian. Lydia's dad, Arun Sebastian, a radiologist at Colchester general hospital and mum Erika Kottiath, an associate director at Barclays Bank, noticed Lydia's voracious appetite for learning when she was quite young, reading well ahead of her peers and picking up the violin by age four. Incredibly, Lydia is not the first child to pass the ultimate test of intelligence this year. Fellow young whiz kids include Nicole Barr, a 12-year-old from Harlow, Essex, and Aahil Jouher, (10) from Blackburn.