MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A five-year-old from Germantown is labeled one of the smartest people in America.
Amogh Banagere looks like your typical five-year-old boy. He solves puzzles, plays with legos and basketball.
But there is something unique about this Dogwood kindergarten.
"He is doing all these third-grade level workbooks right now. He reads the questions, he does it on his own," his mother Swathi Jayanth said.
While Amogh reads at a fourth-grade level, he is also adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying at a third-grade level. His parents said at a young age they noticed their son was gifted and talented so they had him take an IQ test.
Those scores showed, "On the verbal, he scored 96 percentile. This was his score, 127. And on the nonverbal index, he scored 158 which is 99.9 percentile and this was his 1q for this test and it was 148," Jayanth said.
And that's what got him accepted into American Mensa.
"It's awesome that he got into that. It's a really proud moment for us," Jayanth said.
American Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. They only accept people who score in the top 2%of the general population on an intelligence test.
Amogh got his acceptance letter yesterday.
"I am happy because I am getting ice cream for getting into Mensa," Amogh said.
"This is not just about books or math," his dad, Pradeep Banagere said. "His interests vary. Sometimes he likes to watch documentaries about space. Also, (he is into) sports. Ever since he was a small infant he would play with a ball and he plays really well. I take him to go play basketball, tennis, and baseball. I think the first time I gave him a T-ball he started hitting the ball."
But just like every kid Amogh has big dreams. He said he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.