Child Prodigies

Child prodigy is defined as person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level of an adult expert performer.
This project aims to list all child prodigies and to create their family-trees. The list of child prodigies is divided in different categories, feel free to add names or more categories.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mathematics and science

Born 1600 - 1699

• Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (1606–1682) was a Spanish scholastic philosopher, ecclesiastic, mathematician, and writer. He was a precocious child, early delving into serious problems in mathematics and even publishing astronomical tables in his tenth year.
• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher who wrote a treatise on vibrating bodies at the age of nine; his first proof, on a wall with a piece of coal, at 11 years old, and a theorem by 16 years old. He is famous for Pascal's theorem and many other contributions in mathematics, philosophy, and physics.

Born 1700–1799

• André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) wrote a treatise on conic sections at the age of 13 and mastered much of known mathematics by the age of 18.
• Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) made his first ground-breaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. Also at the age of 3 watched his father add up his accounts and corrected him

Born 1800–1899

• William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), a mathematician, read Hebrew at seven years old, and studied Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Sanskrit and four other continental languages at 12 years old.
• Évariste Galois (1811–1832), as a bored and rebellious Lycée pupil was introduced to Legendre's book on geometry. In the words of E.T. Bell he, "read it as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn". Ignoring his teachers, he himself sought out and studied the works of Lagrange and Abel.
• Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920), was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, learned college-level mathematics by age 11, and generated his own theorems in number theory and Bernoulli numbers by age 13 (including independently re-discovering Euler's identity).
• Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) began graduate studies at age 14 at Harvard and was awarded PhD at 18 for a dissertation on mathematical logic.
• William James Sidis (1898–1944) set a record in 1909 by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard College, at 11 years old

Literature

• William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was published at 10 years old; at 13 years old, he published a book of political satire poems
• Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770), tarted as a poet at 11 years old. He began writing the poems that would make him famous at 12 years old.
• Lucretia Maria Davidson (September 27, 1808 – August 27, 1825), by 11 years old, had written some poems of note; before her death at 16 years old, she received praise as a writer.
• Marjorie Fleming (also spelt Marjory; 15 January 1803 – 19 December 1811) was a Scottish child writer and poet.
• Barbara Newhall Follett (born March 4, 1914 – December 7, 1939 (disappeared)) began working on a novel at 8 and was published by age 12

Mental calculators

• Zerah Colburn (1804–1839) had a major display of his ability at age eight.
• Ettore Majorana (1906–1938) could multiply two 3 digit numbers in his head in seconds at the age of 4.
• John von Neumann (1903–1957) A "mental calculator" by six years old, who could tell jokes in classical Greek
• Truman Henry Safford (1836–1901) could square 18 digit numbers at ten years old; later in life, he became an astronomer.
• Shakuntala Devi (1929–2013) was an Indian prodigy mental calculator, who was known for her very rapid calculation abilities - despite having no formal education

Music

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Charles-Valentin Alkan French composer
• Felix Mendelssohn 3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847 first musical debute at the age of 12
• Phillipa Duke Schuyler a noted American child prodigy and pianist who became famous in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of her talent, mixed-race parentage, and the eccentric methods employed by her mother to bring her up.
• Samuel Hersenhoren Samuel (David) Hersenhoren. Conductor, violinist, b Toronto 2 Jul 1908, d there 18 Aug 1982. After studies in Toronto with Samuel Barshtz and with Mrs S.R. McCully at the Hambourg Conservatory, he made his debut at Massey Hall at the age 11

Physics

• Enrico Fermi In 1918, Fermi enrolled at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. In order to enter the Institute, candidates had to take a difficult entrance exam, which included an essay. The given theme was Specific characteristics of Sounds (Italian: Caratteri distintivi dei suoni).The 17-year-old Enrico Fermi chose to derive and solve the partial differential equation for a vibrating rod, applying Fourier analysis. The examiner, Prof. Giuseppe Pittarelli, interviewed Fermi and concluded that his entry would have been commendable even for a doctoral degree. Enrico Fermi achieved first place in the classification of the entrance exam.
• Abdus Salam (1926–1996) At the age of fourteen, Salam scored the highest marks ever recorded for the Matriculation Examination at the Punjab University. A Nobel laureate in Physics for his work in Electro-Weak Theory, Salam holds the distinction of being the first Pakistani Nobel Laureate to receive the prize in the Physical Sciences.
• Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) had an understanding of advanced mathematics by the age of 13 and graduated with a PhD in Physics at the age of 21

Psychology

• Jean Piaget (1896–1980) published a paper on the albino sparrow at 11 years old, and later became a psychologist

Mechanical engineering

• Karl Benz (1844–1929) started at the scientifically oriented Lyzeum at nine years old, went on to study at the Poly-Technical University under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher, and, on September 30, 1860, at an age of just 15, he passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, which he subsequently attended. Benz was graduated July 9, 1864 at age nineteen.[72] Karl Benz later became the pioneering founder of the automobile manufacturer Mercedes-Benz designing the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, widely regarded as the very first automobile.

Visual arts

• Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA (/ˈmɪleɪ/; 8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was a painter who entered the Royal Academy at 11 years old.
• Pablo Picasso painted Picador at eight years old
• Angelica Kauffman, RA (30 October 1741 – 5 November 1807)had professional commissions at thirteen

Academics

• Colin McLaurin (February 1698 – 14 June 1746) went to study divinity in University of Glasgow at the age of 11 and remained until he was 19 years, 7 months old in the year 1717 when he was elected professor of mathematics, where for nearly three hundred years he held the record as the world's youngest professor.
• Pierre Bouguer (1698–1758) was appointed professor of hydrography in 1713 at the age of 15.

Linguistics

• Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) was a multilingual prodigy who went on to become a mathematician
• John Barratier was an 18th-century child prodigy who could speak German, Latin, French and Dutch at the age of 4; knew six languages at the age of 11.
• Jean-François Champollion (a.k.a. Champollion le jeune; 23 December 1790 – 4 March 1832) knew several dead languages by the time he was 10 years old and read an important paper at the Grenoble Academy at 16 years old.
• Edmond-Charles Genêt (1763–1834) could read French, English, Italian, Latin, Swedish, and German by the age of 12.
• Nathan Leopold (1904–1971) started speaking at the age of four months; he reportedly had an IQ of 210,[159] though this is not directly comparable to scores on modern IQ tests.
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) could speak 22 languages at the age of 18.
• Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer (1770–1825) mastered 9 languages by the age of 16,French, English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Hebrew and Greek among other achievements