FAMOUS CHILD PRODIGIES
G'day folks,
Know any really smart kids? I sure do. However, here are some who became famous.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The Austrian-born wunderkind first took up the harpsichord
when he was just 3 years old. He composed his first piece of published music at
age 5, and by his teen years, he had already written several concertos,
sonatas, operas and symphonies. Mozart and his sister Maria Anna—herself a
musical prodigy—traveled widely through Europe exhibiting their talents in
royal courts and public concerts. From Bavaria to Paris, audiences marveled at
the boy wonder’s ability to improvise and play the piano blindfolded or with
one hand crossed over the other.
During a 1764 stopover in London, he was even
tested and examined by a British lawyer and naturalist named Daines Barrington,
who was awestruck by the 8-year-old’s ability to sight-read unfamiliar music
“in a most masterly manner.” Mozart would eventually grow into one of Europe’s
most celebrated and prolific composers. Before his untimely death at age 35, he
wrote more than 600 pieces of music.
Enrico Fermi
Before his work on
radioactivity won him the Nobel Prize and helped usher in the nuclear age,
Enrico Fermi was considered a mathematics and physics prodigy. The Italy native
showed signs of having a photographic memory as a boy, and by age 10 he was
spending his free time mulling over geometric proofs and building electric
motors. After his brother died unexpectedly in 1915, 13-year-old Enrico dealt
with his grief by burying himself in books on trigonometry, physics and
theoretical mechanics.
He then applied to the University of Pisa in 1918,
wowing the admissions panel with a doctoral-level essay that solved the partial
differential equation of a vibrating rod. Fermi achieved his post-secondary
degree from the school several years early at the age of just 21. He later
conducted groundbreaking experiments in neutron bombardment and nuclear chain
reactions before becoming one of the lead physicists on the Manhattan
Project—the secret research program that developed the atomic bomb.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Born in Mexico in 1651, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz learned
to read as a toddler and quickly blazed through all the books in her
grandfather’s library. Despite being denied a formal education because of her
gender, she began writing religious poetry at age 8 and later taught herself
Latin, supposedly mastering it in just 20 lessons. By her adolescence, she had
also studied Greek logic and learned an Aztec language called Nahuatl. Juana’s
reputation for genius later won her a place as a lady-in-waiting at the viceroy’s
court in Mexico City.
When she was 17, she was famously tested by a panel of 40
university professors, all of whom were shocked by her deep knowledge of
philosophy, mathematics and history. The former child prodigy entered a convent
at age 20 and spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun. She continued her
studies, however, and eventually established herself as one of the 17th
century’s most popular authors of drama, poetry and prose. Her image now
appears on the 200-peso bill in Mexico.
Pablo Picasso
As the son of a painter, Pablo Picasso had a brush in his
hand from an early age. The future art legend could reportedly draw before he
could talk, and his mother claimed that when he finally spoke, his first words
were to ask for a pencil. Picasso made his first oil painting when he was 9
years old. His skills soon surpassed those of his father, and at age 14, he was
admitted to a prestigious Barcelona art school. Just a year later, he completed
“First Communion,” an astonishingly mature work that was displayed in a public
exhibition.
The painting was among the first of the more than 22,000 artworks
that Picasso would produce in his eight-decade career. “When I was a child, my
mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become
a monk you’ll end up as the pope,’” he later said. “Instead, I became a painter
and wound up as Picasso.”
Blaise Pascal
Born in 1623 in France, Blaise Pascal spent his youth being
privately tutored at home by his father. The elder Pascal banished mathematics
texts from the house to ensure the boy first focused on languages, but by age
12, young Blaise had secretly invented his own terminology and independently
discovered nearly all the geometric proofs of Euclid. His mathematical genius
only grew from there. At 16, he produced an essay on conic sections so advanced
that the famed philosopher Rene Descartes was convinced his father must have
ghostwritten it; by 19, he had designed and built a mechanical calculator known
as the “Pascaline.”
Pascal went on to publish papers and conduct experiments on
everything from fluid mechanics and perpetual motion to atmospheric pressure
and the philosophy of religion. Before his death at the age of 39, he developed
his famous “Pascal’s Wager,” which uses probability theory to argue for belief
in God.
Clancy's comment: Mm ... There are some amazing facts here about some exceptional folks.
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