>>14310035Marilyn vos Savant was born Marilyn Mach[3] on August 11, 1946,[1] in St. Louis, Missouri, to parents Joseph Mach and Marina vos Savant.[citation needed] Savant says one should keep premarital surnames, with sons taking their fathers' and daughters their mothers'.[4][5] 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, Czechoslovak,[6] German,[7] and Austrian ancestry, being descended from the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach.[8]
As a teenager, Savant worked in her father's general store and wrote for local newspapers using pseudonyms. She married at 16 and divorced ten years later. Her second marriage ended when she was 35.
She went to Meramec Community College and studied philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis but quit two years later to help with a family investment business. Savant moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue a career in writing. Before starting "Ask Marilyn", she wrote the Omni I.Q. Quiz Contest for Omni, which included intelligence quotient (IQ) quizzes and expositions on intelligence and its testing.
Savant married Robert Jarvik (one of the co-developers of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart) on August 23, 1987,[9][10] 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,[11] and as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.[12] Toastmasters International named her one of "Five Outstanding Speakers of 1999", and in 2003 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The College of New Jersey.
