There seems to be a prevailing idea in this thread that child prodigies are created deliberately by parents/mentors. That’s not the case automatically. Child prodigies need access to adult mentors but not all of those mentors set out to create a child prodigy.
Not yet 3, he corrected his father’s ledger (doing the arithmetic in his head), at 7 when asked to add the integers from 1 to 100 he gave the answer instantly as 5050 (having scene intuitively how to sum an arithmatic progression), and as a teen he gave the first new major proof in Euclidean geometry in over 200 years.
Runner up might be von Neumann . From here:
Make that 2000 years for Gauss.
Intelligence is such an abstract and amorphous concept that any discussion of who is the smartest person–much less, who was the smartest as a child–is bound to be inconclusive.
That Wolfgang Mozart and John Stuart Mill have both turned up in this discussion is an excellent illustration of this.
Back in the 1930s a number of American academics undertook a highly suspect project to determine the I.Q.s of famous people in history. They did this by making two surveys of each person’s life, noting remarkable things the individuals had done as children, and then looking at their adult careers. Stephen Jay Gould does a good job of disparaging this study in his fascinating book The Mismeasure of Man.
One result of this study’s methods was that John Quincy Adams was figured to be far, far smarter than Lincoln. Maybe he was. Then again, maybe we just have a lot more information about what Adams was doing as a kid–his father, after all, was president, while Lincoln’s early life is so obscure that there is still some argument as to whether his birth was legitimate, or in what state he was born. There is also, obviously, the point that Adams had a good many more opportunities to excel in his early life.
This study determined that John Stuart Mill had the highest I.Q. in history. The compilers of the study showed a decided prejudice against artistic accomplishment and for mathematical prowess. They did not regard Mozart as a genius, and begrudgingly acknowledged that some of his accomplishments at a young age “may” have been indicators of superior intelligence.
This points up the fact that intelligence is pretty much whatever you decide it is, and that I.Q.'s reflect one opinion, or narrow band of opinion, as to how to define intelligence. I used to know a philosopy professor who was a committed Communist. Tongue fimly in cheek, he said that intelligence was the ability to figure out the best course of action to take and, since Communism was about finding the greatest good for the greatest number, Communists were obviously smarter than other people.
It is intresting to note that Mill and Mozart were both the products of intensive training undertaken at an early age by parents who were out to produce a prodigy. The same is true for Siddis.
By the way, does anyone know if Siddis was the inspiration for The Twisted Thing, the Mike Hammer novel about the boy who father sets out to create a genius?
If I had to venture a guess, I would say that Mozart was the most remarkable prodigy in terms of art, and Siddis ias in terms of technical “left brain” activity.
A case could also be made for Carl Gauss, who was suggested by an earlier poster. Here is a story about Gauss as a child I’ve always liked:
Gauss’ teacher had to leave the room and wanted to keep the class occupied, so she (or he) instructed them to add up all of the numbers from 1 to 100. The kids all set diligently to work, adding up long rows of numbers. All but Gauss; he gave the problem some brief thought, and then wrote down the correct answer, 5050. He reasoned that 1 plus 100 equalled 101, and 2 plus 99 equalled 101…and 50 plus 51 equalled 101. The answer, therefore, must be the same as 50 times 101.
Thank you. I agree it was me.
This will be a matter of opinion, so I’ll move this thread to IMHO.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
LOL!!
What about Bobby Fischer? He won U.S. Senior Chess Championship when he was 14, and became the youngest (at the time) international grandmaster at age 15.
a) The OP must have watched Oprah today
b) As one of my teachers always said, all IQ measures is how good you do on an IQ test. It is easy to find patterns in the questions, and those of us who’ve taken an IQ test know many questions are simply rediculous- once I was asked who Charles Darwin was (even if I didn’t, how does that show my intelligence?).
c) a Prodigy doesn’t need to be a genius. They need to be very talented. If Mozart didn’t know how to read he’d still be a prodigy.
Here’s the most complete description of Mill’s education I could find online:
http://www.towson.edu/~xsommer/jsmill.html
It says that by the time he was 8 he had read in the original Greek “Aesop’s Fables, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the whole of the historian Herodotus.” He had also read “the satirist Lucian, the historian of philosophy Diogenes Laërtius, the Athenian writer and educational theorist Isocrates, and six dialogues of Plato.” He’d also read a lot of history in English. At 9 he began to learn Latin, Euclid’s geometry, and algebra. He’d read all the standard Greek and Latin authors by the time he was 10.
No, he didn’t learn Greek by having his father speak it with him. That’s not how people learned Ancient Greek then, and I don’t think anybody now does it that way either. It’s clear from what the biographies say that he learned Ancient Greek by learning to read it and translate it into written English. I just discovered that I have a copy of Mill’s autobiography on my bookshelves. I’ll get back to you with some more examples when I finish it.
The greatest child genius of all time was Quiz Kid Donny Smith of course.
Here is the full text of the Mill autobiography. Most of the first chapter goes into great detail about what he learned at what age. The other chapters are linked at the bottom of the page.
bettybad and a chorus of others:
Am I the only person in the whole hemisphere who thinks most of his music sounds as if it had been written by a 4-year-old? (Or by a Muzak salesperson for an audience of senior citizens with fragile hearts, maybe?)
OK, “Turkish March” is listenable. Most of the rest is profoundly forgettable. IMHO.