I remember reading about two child geniuses in a Sassy magazine in the 1980s. I wish I could find that article, I’d love to find out what they’re doing now. Even though there didn’t seem to be much pressure or abuse from their parents, it was all very sad.
Whoa. Hold it. On a whim, I typed in the only name I could remember from the article– Adragon. It turns out he’s taking care of his dying father. You can read about it here:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2001/April/27/top/stories/2top.htm
Dang. How did I live before this Internet thing?
Thank you, Lobsang. Happy to be here!
Whoa. Hold it. On a whim, I typed in the only name I could remember from the article– Adragon. It turns out he’s taking care of his dying father. You can read about it here:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2001/April/27/top/stories/2top.htm
Dang. How did I live before this Internet thing?
You can make a good case for John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist, as being one of the most amazing prodigies. He was learning Ancient Greek at 3.
So? So did all of the ancient Greeks. A child will pick up two or three languages about as quickly as one, if they’re spoken around the house. If someone learned ancient Greek at age three, that says more about the parents than about the kid.
Chronos is right. It is so obvious when you think about it.
If it is amazing that a 3 year old can learn Greek, then it is amazing that one can learn English.
(actually - it is amazing. Skills that we take for granted really are amazing)
Samuel Reshevsky? (Chess Grandmaster)
He gave simultaneous exhibitions at 6.
I’d vote Mozart, Mills or Sidis but I don’t think it is possible to say who was the greatest child prodigy of all time because there are children out there whose parents don’t trot them into the public eye.
What creates a prodigy? I think it’s nature and nurture and a child who finds a passion early in life. I think a kid can only be called a prodigy and/or a genius when they are transforming a domain of knowledge (does that rule Mills out?). Mozart was composing music from very young.
So a kid who is doing university level study at 8 isn’t necessarily a genius. They’re extraordinary and unusual but not a genius.
There’s a hell of a lot of sad stories associated with precocious kids though. Adragon is a case in point and Justin Chapman’s case was just tragic.
Peter Parker.
Hey, how about them Olsen twins?
Few people admire Mozart more than I do, but I’m not sure he’s the greatest child prodigy ever, or even close to it.
Think about this- if Mozart had died at age 20, would he still be remembered today? I doubt it. Oh, he might be remembered by Robert Ripley (“Believe it or not, Wolfgang Mozart played for the emperor when he was only 6”), but would he still be hailed as a great composer? Would the symphonies and operas he’d written still be part of every orchestra’s repertory? I don’t think so.
Look, it’s impressive that he played instruments and composed at an early age, but it’s NOT his childish efforts we acclaim him for- it’s the great work he did as an ADULT we honor him for.
On the other hand, if Chopin or Mendelssohn (far lesser composers, I admit) had died at 20, much of their music WOULD still be acclaimed today. Both did greater work in their youth than Mozart did, IMHO.
I’d disagree. That makes genius circumstantial. If Einstein was born in 1988 and suppose someone in the meanwhile had more or less discovered relativity, would that make him any less of a genius ?
Chronos writes:
> So did all of the ancient Greeks.
You know, I suspected that someone would come up with this sort of snide rejoinder. Yeah, it wouldn’t mean much if Mill had learned Ancient Greek in the way that the ancient Greeks had learned it, by hearing it spoken around the house. That’s not what happened. Mill learned it in the same way that an adult learns Ancient Greek, by being given texts in Ancient Greek and by being tutored by his father. The point is that at age 3 he was already reading English well enough that he could use English translations of Ancient Greek and Greek/English dictionaries to help him learn the language.
And this is only one example of the many adult-level subjects that Mill learned as a child. Read a biography of Mill. Most of the people who have studied the biographies of the well-known child prodigies have agreed that Mill is one of the most amazing of them.
Please understand what I’m saying here. I’m not making any claim about Mill’s intelligence. We have absolutely no way of telling what the intelligence of 99.9% of all the people who ever lived was (even assuming that intelligence is a real measurable quantity, and that’s highly disputed). Even among the people who lived in the past century who were in the right countries to have their I.Q. tested, we have no idea how much heredity and how much environment affected their I.Q. scores.
To call someone a child prodigy is to say that they learned a lot of adult-level academic subjects (or possibly also artistic knowledge) as a child. In every case where this happened, the child had an adult mentor (usually a parent) who decided that the child should be a prodigy and began tutoring them from an early age. Calling someone a child prodigy is not saying anything about how intelligent they really are or how productive in intellectual or artistie work they will become as an adult. (Probably it’s necessary to have a certain high level of natural intelligence to become a child prodigy. Probably most child prodigies are reasonably productive as adults. I don’t know for sure and I offer no opinion on these subjects. The only thing I know for sure is that a child prodigy must have an adult mentor.)
Arguing about whether someone who didn’t have a mentor would have been a child prodigy if they had had one is pointless. Being a child prodigy says only that one learned a lot of adult-level subjects as a child. If you just want to call someone intelligent, call them intelligent. If you want to say that they were very productive as an adult in intellectual or artistic subjects, call them a genius.
I must reply to Chronos as well…
Language acquisition in children is not a prodigy-type skill. It is an innate skill (chomsky, et al.) that we all possess. Ever heard of the critical period (skinner, et al.)? It is a period roughly between ages 6 and 15 when lg acquisition, in particular, is optimal. As you may or may not have exsperienced yourself, L2 acquisition as an adult is a completely different game and extremely difficult for most people regardless of intelligence.
Just wanted to address that one particular point…lg acquisition in childhood is by no means evidence of being a prodigy.
Sorry, but I have to digress for a moment. Some of you folks are misusing the word genius, sometimes in direct opposition to its actual meaning. Here’s the dictionary (Meriam-Webster) definition;
a person endowed with transcendent mental superiority; especially : a person with a very high intelligence quotient.
That’s all it means. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether someone has contributed greatly to the world as a whole, or to a particular field. Probably, most geniuses never contribute anything that the world at large recognizes, due to lack of motivation or opportunity or plain bad luck.
This gets confusing because we commonly refer to people who do revolutionize their fields, or greatly excel at something, geniuses, regardless of their actual level of intelligence. The two aren’t necessarily related. Some of the greatest musicians/composers have been, from all accounts, dumb as bricks in every other regard. Perhaps savant would be a better term. Or, simply, “supremely talented”. Then again, maybe we just don’t know how to measure the kind of intellect these people have.
Back to the OP. My vote would still be for Mozart, though I admit this is partly due to my own limited knowledge of other prodigies.
Re: Davebear. Excellent point about the genius definition. I dont agree, however, with the use of the word “savant” in this context. A “savant” (used to be called an “idiot savant”) may in fact be a prodigy in a very limited area but savant skills are a very special set of skills and a savant’s other cognitive skills may be extremely lacking. Savant-ism is highly associated with autism.
So…a “savant” might be a prodigy, but I dont think a prodigy would necessarily be a savant.
Steven Wolfram maybe.
If Mills’ father was tutoring him in ancient Greek, then it was being spoken around the house. I say my point still stands, on that at least. You did mention other subjects he studied as a child, though… Perhaps you could give us examples?