Child prodigies and children who have exceptional talents frequently figure in entertainment media. [1] [2] This article indicates some examples of characters cited as child prodigies in such media.
Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for the future, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabilities of competitors. Genius is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity. The term genius can also be used to refer to people characterised by genius, and/or to polymaths who excel across many subjects.
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.
Walter Henry Breen Jr. was an American numismatist, writer, and convicted child sex offender. He was known among coin collectors for writing Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins. "Breen numbers", from his encyclopedia, are widely used to attribute varieties of coins. He was also known for activity in the science fiction fan community and for his writings in defense of pederasty as a NAMBLA activist. He was arrested in 1990 for child sex abuse and died in prison three years later.
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average and is also known as high potential. It is a characteristic of children, variously defined, that motivates differences in school programming. It is thought to persist as a trait into adult life, with various consequences studied in longitudinal studies of giftedness over the last century. These consequences sometimes include stigmatizing and social exclusion. There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above 130. Definitions of giftedness also vary across cultures.
Gifted education is a sort of education used for children who have been identified as gifted or talented.
A mental calculator or human calculator is a person with a prodigious ability in some area of mental calculation.
Little Man Tate is a 1991 American drama film directed by Jodie Foster from a screenplay written by Scott Frank. The film stars Adam Hann-Byrd as Fred Tate, a seven-year-old child prodigy who struggles to self-actualize in social and psychological settings that largely fail to accommodate his intelligence. It also stars Foster, Dianne Wiest, Harry Connick Jr., David Hyde Pierce, Debi Mazar and P.J. Ochlan.
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.
Michael Kevin Kearney is an American college teaching assistant and game show contestant. He is known for setting several world records related to graduating at a young age, as well as teaching college students while still a teenager. Additionally, as a game-show contestant, he has won over one million dollars.
Adragon De Mello is an American prodigy who graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in computational mathematics in 1988, at age 11. At the time, he was the youngest college graduate in U.S. history, a record that was later broken in 1994 by Michael Kearney.
Kim Ung-Yong is a South Korean civil engineer. During his youth, he was recognized as a child prodigy with the highest recorded IQ having scored above 210 on the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale, He entered university at the age of 4. At 7, he received an invitation to work at NASA. By the age of 5, he already spoke 5 languages.
IQ classification is the practice of categorizing human intelligence, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, into categories such as "superior" and "average".
Sheldon Lee Cooper, Ph.D., Sc.D., is a fictional character and one of the main protagonists in the CBS television series The Big Bang Theory and its spinoff series Young Sheldon, portrayed by actors Jim Parsons and Iain Armitage respectively. For his portrayal, Parsons won four Primetime Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a TCA Award, and two Critics' Choice Television Awards. The character's childhood is the focus of Young Sheldon, in which he grows up in East Texas with his family Missy Cooper, George Cooper Sr., George Cooper Jr., Mary Cooper and his grandmother, Connie Tucker, as a child prodigy.
Sho Timothy Yano is an American physician. Yano is a former child prodigy and has an estimated IQ of 200.
Walter O'Brien is an Irish businessman and information technologist. He was also the executive producer and loose inspiration for the television series Scorpion. He is known for claiming various accomplishments, including a childhood IQ of 197, which have been scrutinized and remain unproven.
Walter O'Brien is the fictional lead character in the American drama television series, Scorpion. The character is inspired by the Irish businessman and information technologist of the same name. The character, played by actor Elyes Gabel, follows a loose trajectory of Walter O'Brien's real-life exploits that thwart terrorism and disasters in each episode of the series.
Shaira Ana Teresiana Luna is a Filipina photographer. She, among others, was known as a "gifted child" and a "Promil kid", having been featured in Wyeth's infant formula ad in 1995.
Young Sheldon is an American sitcom television series created by Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro that aired on CBS from September 25, 2017, to May 16, 2024. The series is a spin-off prequel to The Big Bang Theory that takes place during the late 1980s and early-to-mid-1990s, and follows child prodigy Sheldon Cooper as he grows up with his family in East Texas. Iain Armitage stars as Sheldon, alongside Zoe Perry, Lance Barber, Montana Jordan, Raegan Revord, and Annie Potts. Jim Parsons, who portrayed the adult Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, narrated the series and served as an executive producer.