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 defined in psychology research literature as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain at the level of an adult expert. The term is also applied more broadly to young people who are extraordinarily talented in some field.
Walter Henry Breen Jr. was an American numismatist, writer, and convicted child sex offender; as well as the husband of author Marion Zimmer Bradley. 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.
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average. 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. 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 and 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 exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. 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.
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 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 broken in 1994 by Michael Kearney. His early achievements may have been more due to endless hard work than to inherent intellectual capabilities.
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.
IQ classification is the practice of categorizing human intelligence, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, into categories such as "superior" or "average".
Sheldon Lee Cooper, Ph.D., Sc.D., is a fictional character 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 as a child prodigy.
A.N.T. Farm is an American teen sitcom which originally aired on Disney Channel from May 6, 2011, to March 21, 2014. It first aired on May 6, 2011, as a special one-episode preview and continued as a regular series starting on June 17, 2011. After airing as the preview of the series, the pilot episode "transplANTed" later re-aired after the series finale of The Suite Life on Deck. The series was created by Dan Signer, a former writer and co-executive producer of The Suite Life on Deck and creator of the YTV series Mr. Young. In mid-November 2010, Disney Channel greenlit the series, with production beginning in early 2011. The first promo was released during the premiere of Lemonade Mouth.
Philippa Duke Schuyler was an American concert pianist, composer, author, and journalist.
Sho Timothy Yano is an American physician. Yano is a former child prodigy and has an estimated IQ of 200.
Young Sheldon is an American coming-of-age sitcom television series created by Chuck Lorre and Steven Molaro for CBS. The series, set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a spin-off prequel to The Big Bang Theory and follows main character Sheldon Cooper growing up with his family in East Texas. Iain Armitage stars as young Sheldon, alongside Zoe Perry, Lance Barber, Montana Jordan, Raegan Revord, and Annie Potts. Jim Parsons, who portrays the adult Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, narrates the series and is also an executive producer.