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]
See Chess prodigy for details of child prodigies at chess.
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. [20]
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.
John Horton Conway was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
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 child prodigy is a person under the age of ten 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.
Terence Chi-Shen Tao is an Australian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. 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 the age of 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist, chess national master and a chess composer.
Baroness Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgian-American physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression.
Donald Bruce Gillies was a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer programming environments.
Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian 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.
The International János Bolyai Prize of Mathematics is an international prize founded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The prize is named after János Bolyai and is awarded every five years to mathematicians for monographs with important new results in the preceding 10 years.
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 bronze in 1986 at the age of 10.
Yasha Asley is a British mathematics child prodigy of Iranian descent.
James Ellis Colliander is an American-Canadian mathematician. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at University of British Columbia and served as Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) during 2016-2021. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and lived there until age 8 and then moved to Hastings, Minnesota. He graduated from Macalester College in 1989. He worked for two years at the United States Naval Research Laboratory on fiber optic sensors and then went to graduate school to study mathematics. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1997 and was advised by Jean Bourgain. Colliander was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and spent semesters at the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.
Nets Hawk Katz is the W.L. Moody Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. He was a professor of mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington until March 2013 and the IBM Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology until 2023.
Sho Timothy Yano is an American physician. Yano is a former child prodigy and has an estimated IQ of 200.
Peter Scholze is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. He has been a professor at the University of Bonn since 2012 and director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 2018. He has been called one of the leading mathematicians in the world. He won the Fields Medal in 2018, which is regarded as the highest professional honor in mathematics.
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.