Oh, man, I forgot about the cancer “cartoon” I saw when I was about five! It was an animation of your blood moving through your body. They were anthropomorphized as these blobby worker guys in overalls and caps carrying buckets. Then, the cancer started, and thug blobby workers started attacking the regular ones and taking over, and they kept multiplying. Nightmare fuel.
My mother used to say I taught myself to read in defense of the fact that our housekeeper couldn’t read - it was a toss up if she opened a can of spinach (gross!) for our lunch, or a can of chicken noodle soup! I don’t think that’s true, though.
I did learn to read at a young age, maybe three years old. And I was a speed demon with jigsaw puzzles.
I’ve been a staunch opponent of the Electoral College since reading about the election of 1876 as a second grader.
Although I didn’t pursue it, I had an excellent understanding of mathematics and the relationships between numbers as a child (for example, I determined that base -1 behaves similarly regardless of the base). I readily grasped exponents and logs, which left most of my classmates floundering. Other than leading me to hard science fiction, this talent has led me only to a better quick and intuitive grasp of erroneous statistical interpretations appearing in publications in my field.
I understood inflation by the time I was six. My dad would always complain about prices and tell me the prices of things from when he was a kid in the late fifties through the things he bought as an adult in the 1970s. At some point, I asked him about salaries, and I could see the clear relationship between prices and salaries, and how prices increased over time. I worked out that prices were generally about ten times more than when he was a kid and 4-5 times more than the start of the 1970s.
Since my Dad never stopped complaining about prices, I added to my skills when I learned to multiply decimals in fourth grade. At that point, I had a working understanding of how interest rates were affected by inflation (I knew both inflation and mortgage rates were high in the 1970s when he was buying houses and investing in his business). When I could understand how to multiply decimals, I also understood the compound growth of savings.
Watching the financial news on TV was another big pastime for my Dad. So, after figuring out compound interest, I worked out the basics of discounted cash flow modeling for bonds and the dividend discount and earnings discount models of stock price valuation entirely on my own although I didn’t know that’s what they were called. That probably happened when I was in the fifth or sixth grade.
I also loved cars as a kid and I used to love to compile tables of data about cars I liked. For a lot of cars, I had top speeds but for many, I didn’t, which stressed my compulsion. To fill in the gaps, I worked out a model that linked horsepower, frontal area (width x height), and my estimate of slipperiness to estimate top speed. First I tested it on the cars whose top speeds I knew until I had a formula that more or less worked on those cars, then I estimated all the other cars in my table. So, by the time I was 13, I had tried to re-invent linear regression (without actually succeeding) and to use it to estimate a number that amounted to coefficient of drag for a bunch of cars I liked. The results weren’t terrible because when I learned the tested top speeds of some of the cars I estimated, I was pretty close.
When I was in sixth grade, I read the book One Two Three… Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science by George Gamow. There I learned about Georg Cantor’s proof of the uncountability of the real numbers. That was what made me decide to become a mathematician:
I was 4 when I understood how ginormous stars were and that they looked tiny due to their distance. My playmates thought I was a poopy head when I told them.
Wow, there’s a name I haven’t seen in a long time that bring back memories. I, too, read George Gamow as a young kid, but in looking through his publications I can’t remember which one it was (or maybe more than one). My vague recollection is that it was much more about astronomy than math.
That’s one of the strange things about this book inspiring me to be a mathematician. Gamow was a theoretical physicist. His popularized science books mostly had titles like The Birth and Death of the Sun, The Biography of the Earth, and A Planet Called Earth. And yet it’s One, Two, Three… Infinity that remains the one that’s sold the most, the one with the most editions, and the one easiest to find to this day. On the other hand, probably the author who inspired the most people (born from about 1940 to about 1970) to become mathematicians was Martin Gardner. Gardner wrote the column “Mathematical Games” in Scientific American. Some of those columns were put together into collections. Despite this, Gardner wasn’t trained as a scientist at all.
When I was in elementary school I was bored to tears in math and english, where I was several grades ahead. So I had special permission to go to the library and read whatever I wanted. In Grade 4 I discovered Robert Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit - Will Travel”. Heinlein’s juveniles were incredibly inspiring to me, because they were full of young people who knew lots of things.
In particular, a 9 year old genius girl named PeeWee knew calculus and Occam’s Razor and other stuff I had never heard of, so I was determined to learn it. Surprisingly, the elementary school didn’t have calculus texts, so I got my mom to take me on the bus to the big public library, and I got some advanced math books.
It was all greek to me. I didn’t have anywhere near the prerequisite skills and eventually gave up. But I did figure out what differentiation and integration were, and got the idea of limits. But trying to learn that stuff gave me a lot of confidence in school math, and I never had any problems with any math at all until university.
In grade 7, my math skillz got me into an experimental computing program, where the school had an old ASR-33 teletype connected to a university mainframe through a lightning fast 110 baud modem. I learned to program in BASIC, and by the time I got to grade 11 I had written a computer game that was purchased by a company called Instant Software, run by the same guy who started BYTE magazine.
Being a really poor kid, I thought I was going to be rich. The company would send me production updates amd royalty projections saying I could expect to make tens of thousands of dollars per year (I was working minimum wage for $3.65/hr part time, so that was a huge amount of money). This was in 1979-1980.
Then the spftware company went bankrupt and closed their doors. The game was never released, and I got a $400 settlement cheque from the bankruptcy. That was a huge letdown.
I saw that too! And much later, when I described it, I couldn’t find anyone who knew what I was talking about. Thanks!!
Calculus was a near miss, for me. I remember once when I was in single-digit ages, when I realized that, although you could measure constant speed as distance divided by time, that wouldn’t work if your speed was changing. And you could try measuring smaller and smaller intervals, but the endpoint of that was zero distance divided by zero time, and that was nonsensical.
Unfortunately, I lacked the skill to express this question clearly enough to ask an adult about it, and I’m not sure I’d have found the right adult to ask it of, anyway.
There are two types of people who will be perceived as dumb:
Dumb people surrounded by smart people, but also smart people surrounded by dumb people.
Annoying doesn’t equal dumb
When I was 8 or so I found a book about black holes in my grandfather’s library. I read the whole thing, which included lots of interesting speculation about white holes, naked singularities, time travel around rotating black holes, and so on. I continue to be fascinated with the subject.
I’ve always been pretty good at math. Nowhere close to prodigy level, just several grades ahead. And I’ve managed to retain it, because I was always interested in it, and continue to learn in my spare time. At any rate, I suspect that my math skills in second grade exceeded 90% of adults. That’s not really saying much, though, which I find distressing. Most people are almost totally innumerate.
Yeah. Sounds like experience from these boards. 
(snack, ow, runs away).
But I was surrounded by 4 and 5 year olds at the time so that rule is a bit harsh.
Heh. I also was aware that santa was bullshit but only because we didn’t observe Christmas and my parents told me. As soon as I could speak I took great delight wising up other kids. ( Needed a smack, ow, runs away).
I know I saw it, because it freaked me right out! Glad I could confirm your memory. 
My parents told my there was no Santa, but that I shouldn’t inform the Christian children of this because that was their parents’ job to manage. And I never did.
I can’t remember when I learned to read.
But I do remember the first time I was in class and we were learning to read. I did not understand what was happening. The teacher handed out the Dick and Jane books. Maybe not that exact one, but just like it.
I was somewhere in the middle of the seating. I started flipping through the book, reading it. Pretty dull stuff! Then I listened to the kids trying to go through it. I was confused. I did not understand why they were having so much trouble.
When it came my turn I just casually read it out fine.
Never gave it another thought.
When I got home I as usual read some comic books that an older kid we were living with had. Later on I graduated to reading some of the Grollier Encyclopedia and medical books we had.
I have vague memories of trying to decipher signs when I was very little. Trying to match up the alphabet sounds with the letters. Guess it worked.
I wasn’t told that and felt it my duty to break the heart of every kid I met. I had about 30 first graders in the hallway crying in December of ‘67. It was quite a scandal that ended with my Dad telling the teacher and principal I could be punished only if they could prove I was lying. He still wasn’t real happy about them trying to “cure” my left handedness the year before.
About 5 years later my brother pulled the same thing.