In psychology research literature, the term child prodigy is defined as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level of an adult expert professional. [1] [2] [3]
In psychology research literature, the term child prodigy is defined as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level of an adult expert professional. [1] [2] [3]
Some children become famous and are called a prodigy although it is questionable whether they have produced meaningful output to the level of an adult expert professional. [38]
Stanisław Marcin Ulam was a Polish mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved a number of theorems and proposed several conjectures.
Norbert Wiener was an American computer scientist, mathematician and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.
A chess prodigy is a young child who possesses an aptitude for the game of chess that far exceeds what might be expected at their age. Their prodigious talent will often enable them to defeat experienced adult players and even titled chess masters. Some chess prodigies have progressed to become grandmasters or even World Chess Champions.
A child prodigy is, technically, a child under the age of 10 who produces meaningful work in some domain at the level of an adult expert. The term is also applied more broadly to describe young people who are extraordinarily talented in some field.
Charles Louis Fefferman is an American mathematician at Princeton University, where he is currently the Herbert E. Jones, Jr. '43 University Professor of Mathematics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978 for his contributions to mathematical analysis.
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with mathematical and linguistic skills. He was active as a mathematician, linguist, historian, and author. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925, in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics. His works were published under various pseudonyms, as he never used his real name as an author.
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark is a British–Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. In the public eye, she is best known for having been a child prodigy in mathematics.
Richard Courant was a German-American mathematician. He is best known by the general public for the book What is Mathematics?, co-written with Herbert Robbins. His research focused on the areas of real analysis, mathematical physics, the calculus of variations and partial differential equations. He wrote textbooks widely used by generations of students of physics and mathematics. He is also known for founding the institute now bearing his name.
Erik D. Demaine is a Canadian-American professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy.
Terence Chi-Shen Tao is an Australian-American mathematician, Fields medalist, and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory.
Noam David Elkies is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. At age 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist, chess national master, and chess composer.
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.
Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these curves are stress trajectories.
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian-American mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
Felix Earl Browder was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society until 2000. His two younger brothers also became notable mathematicians, William Browder and Andrew Browder.
Lenhard Ng is an American mathematician, working primarily on symplectic geometry. Ng is a professor of mathematics at Duke University.
Raúl Arturo Chávez Sarmiento is a Peruvian child prodigy in mathematics. At the age of 11 years, 271 days, he won a bronze medal at the 2009 International Mathematical Olympiad, making him the second youngest medalist in IMO history, behind Terence Tao, who won a bronze medal in 1986 at the age of 10.
Awonder Liang is an American chess Grandmaster. A chess prodigy in his youth, he was the third-youngest American to qualify for the title of Grandmaster, at the age of 14. Liang was twice world champion in his age category.
June E Huh is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor at Stanford University. He was awarded the Fields Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He has been noted for the linkages that he has found between algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
Daniel Larsen is an American mathematician known for proving a 1994 conjecture of W. R. Alford, Andrew Granville and Carl Pomerance on the distribution of Carmichael numbers, commonly known as Bertrand's postulate for Carmichael numbers.
For the purposes of this and future research, a prodigy was defined as a child younger than 10 years of age who has reached the level of a highly trained professional in a demanding area of endeavor.
At the moment, the most widely accepted definition is a child, typically under the age of 10, who has mastered a challenging skill at the level of an adult professional.
His study of foreign languages began with French, which his father taught him in a novel way, fully described in the chapter on his education in the languages. So successful was this special method that within a year Karl was reading French with ease. Meanwhile he had begun the study of Italian, and from Italian passed to Latin. English came next, then the study of Greek, a language concerning which the boy's curiosity was whetted by tales from Homer and Xenophon told to him by his father... In all five languages the boy made such progress that by the time he was nine, according to his father's statement, he had read Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Cicero, Ossian, Fénelon, Florian, and Metastasio, besides Schiller and other German writers.