https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
IQ is standardised so that population scores on a standard test have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. It's possible to obtain this with as fewer than 100 people, distributed as:
* One "genius" who scores 200
* One "dumbass" who scores 0
* 87 "everyman" who score 100.
The mean here is clearly 100, and the variance is sqrt(20000/89) = 14.99.
Of course this is very contrived and doesn't look much like a Bell curve in the first place. But with say a million people it wouldn't take much to come up with a more realistic looking example.
It would be handy to have standardized test answers from every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point out.
A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have ever been born.
So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever, you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?
Also, I'm wondering whether a difference of 1 IQ point is even noticeable, and if not, what's the smallest noticeable increment or faction of a unit.
