Marilyn vos Savant

he was born Marilyn Mach in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents—Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant—were German and Italian respectively. She says one should keep premarital surnames, with sons taking their fathers’ and daughters their mothers’.^[1] The word savant, meaning someone of learning, appears twice in her family: her grandmother’s name was Savant; her grandfather’s, vos Savant. She is of Italian, German,^[2] and Austrian ancestry, being descended from physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.^[3]

Teenage Savant worked in her father’s general store and wrote for local newspapers but stayed pseudonymous to avoid using her name for work she found wanting. She married at 16 but divorced ten years later. Her second marriage ended when she was 35.

She went to Meramec Community College and took philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis but quit two years later to help with a family investment business. Having sought financial freedom to launch a career in writing, Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s. Prior to starting “Ask Marilyn”, she wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which included I.Q. quizzes and expositions on intelligence and its testing.

Savant married Robert Jarvik (one developer of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart) on August 23, 1987 and was made Chief Financial Officer of Jarvik Heart, Inc. She has served on the Board of Directors of the National Council on Economic Education, on the advisory boards of the National Association for Gifted Children and the National Women's History Museum,^[4] and as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.^[5] Toastmasters International named her one of “Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999”, and in 2003 she got an honorary Doctor of Letters from The College of New Jersey.