The IQ Award is a prize donated by the high-IQ association Mensa to honor people and organisations who have done remarkable contributions to public welfare by an intelligent idea, scientific research about human intelligence or the positive image of intelligence in the public. Candidates can be nominated by Mensa members and former award winner. After being checked by an internal commission, all Mensa members can vote for which nominee to win the award.
The German IQ Award is held annually since 2004. The winners are:
2004: Albrecht Beutelspacher for his Mathematikum
2005: Günther Jauch for his TV show "Der Große IQ-Test" (The big IQ test)
2006: Die Sendung mit der Maus, a children's TV series
2007: Ranga Yogeshwar, a German TV host
2008: Dieter Nuhr, a Comedian
2009: Harald Lesch, an astrophysicist and TV host
2010: Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German issue of Scientific American
Since 2011 the award is issued in the two categories "Wissenschaft/Innovation" (Science/Innovation) and "Kultur/Medien" (Culture/Media):
2011: Heatball and Richard David Precht
2012: Eckart von Hirschhausen and due to the same number of votes Franz Porzsolt and Florian Freistetter for ScienceBlogs
2013: Auticon
2014: Jonny Lee Miller. While Edward Snowden had been nominated by Mensa members, and the IQ commission had approved his nomination, the managing board of Mensa threatened the IQ commission to subdue Snowden's nomination, so that the Mensa members were not able to vote for him. This caused a big controversy among the members, but the board did not change the vote. As a consequence, the opposing members agreed to vote for Miller as the most nonsensical candidate.
