7 Famous Child Prodigies

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the child prodigy par excellence, playing songs on the harpsichord at four years old and composing simple music at five. When he was seven years old, the Mozart family went on the first of several tours to demonstrate the prodigious musical abilities of the young marvel and his elder sister Maria Anna (“Nannerel”), who was also remarkably gifted. So there is no shortage of anecdotes about the young Mozart’s astonishing musical dexterity, memory, and creativity in composition. 

One episode stands out, from a visit to the Vatican in 1770, when Mozart was 14 years old. The story concerns a famous piece of late Renaissance choral music, the Miserere, composed by Gregorio Allegri (1582–1652). Allegri had been a priest and member of the choir of the Sistine Chapel, and his composition, a setting of the 50th Psalm, was so well loved by the occupants of the Vatican that at some point it became forbidden to transcribe it for performance elsewhere. Only three authorized copies were ever made. In 1770 Mozart and his father heard a performance of the Miserere during Holy Week. That night Mozart was unable to fall asleep, so he got up and amused himself by transcribing the whole thing from memory. He went back to hear the piece a second time a few days later, using the performance to correct a few errors in his copy, which he had concealed in his hat.

Musicologists have since pointed out that Mozart’s feat of memory was extraordinary but maybe not as miraculous as it sounds at first. The Miserere is a somewhat repetitive piece, and Mozart’s transcription probably didn’t include improvised ornamental passages that would have been part of the original performance. Even so, a modern performance takes 12 to 15 minutes, and remembering it all would require following music written for two choirs, one with five parts and one with four, brought together at the end in nine-part counterpoint.   

Some people have more mental power than they know what to do with. Biographers report that at the age of six the Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann was able to joke with his father in classical Greek. As a party trick, the pint-sized prodigy would memorize pages from the telephone book and answer questions about the names, numbers, and addresses or just recite the page from top to bottom.

As an adult, von Neumann came to be regarded as the preeminent mathematician of his era, responsible for major contributions in mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science.

Extraordinary ability doesn’t always show up where you’d expect it. In 1648 or 1651 (records differ on the date) Juana Ramírez de Asbaje was born to unwed parents in the town of San Miguel Nepantla in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (now Mexico). She showed remarkable intellectual potential early on, learning to read at the age of three, but her gender and her family’s limited finances prevented her from receiving formal education. Eventually, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Mexico City, where she had access to a library. She read voraciously, learning Latin in about 20 lessons. She wrote her first dramatic poem when she was eight years old. Word of her extraordinary intelligence spread, and when she was about 16 she went to the court of the viceroy of New Spain as a lady of the viceroy’s wife. To showcase Juana’s miraculous erudition, the viceroy arranged a public demonstration in which a group of about 40 professors quizzed her on their fields of knowledge. The depth and breadth of her knowledge astonished onlookers.

Uninterested in marriage and desperate for more books to read, Juana entered a convent in 1669, officially becoming Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She continued to produce poems, plays, and philosophical tracts. She also amassed a collection of books and scientific instruments that was one of the largest in the Americas at the time. Today she is remembered as one of the most important writers of the Baroque period of Mexican literature.  

One of the greatest self-taught mathematicians of all-time, Srinivasa Ramanujan, grew up poor in Kumbakonam, India. An outstanding student known for his exceptional memory, Ramanujan’s ascent into the highest levels of mathematics began in 1903, at age 16, when he was able to borrow an outdated copy of an English textbook of advanced mathematics. Despite the book’s shortcomings, Ramanujan studied it obsessively, recording his work in notebooks that he carried with him everywhere. His passion for math actually hurt him in other areas of life; in 1904 he lost a scholarship to the University of Madras because he had no interest in any other academic work.

While working as a clerk, Ramanujan started sending his work to mathematicians in England and requesting their advice. A few didn’t respond. Then, in 1913, Godfrey Hardy, a mathematician at Cambridge University, received a package of papers from Ramanujan. At first, Hardy suspected some kind of fraud or joke. Some of the formulas were already known. But he also found other things that struck him as more unusual and potentially important. They started up a correspondence, and, in 1914, Hardy convinced Ramanujan to come to Cambridge. There Hardy tutored him and they collaborated on research. Ramanujan published prolifically over the next few years and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1918. But his health, which had always been fragile, worsened, and he died in 1919, at the age of 32.  

Despite being blind from birth and growing up in poverty, Stevie Wonder (born Steveland Judkins Morris) became a skilled musician in early childhood, learning to write music, sing, and play the piano, organ, harmonica, and drums. In 1962, at age 12, he began recording music and performing professionally under the name Little Stevie Wonder. Although his stage name suggested a novelty child performer, he quickly established himself as a serious musician who combined creative songwriting and mastery of disparate styles of music including rhythm and blues, soul, funk, rock, and jazz. By his 21st birthday he had written or cowritten more than a dozen hit songs. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, when he was only 38 years old.

The 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal wasn’t taught math at all as a child. He was educated privately by his father, Étienne, a mathematician and tax collector, who had decided that it was best for children to master Greek and Latin first and then move on to math and science later in life. To this end, he had all the mathematics texts removed from their house. But according to a biography written by his sister Gilberte, Blaise ended up excelling in mathematics without any instruction at all. At age 12 he “discovered” that interior angles of a triangle always add up to the sum of two right angles, a fact that was well known to mathematicians but had been kept from him. Realizing that his son had an extraordinary talent, Étienne relented and began introducing mathematical concepts. About three years later Blaise published his first original mathematical work, Essai pour les coniques (1640; Essay on Conic Sections). It was impressive enough to arouse the envy of René Descartes, who accused Étienne of writing the paper and passing it off as his son’s. Two years later Blaise invented a mechanical adding and subtracting device. It was the first calculating machine to be manufactured in significant numbers and the first to be used for business. In the 1640s and ’50s, Pascal established himself as one of Europe’s greatest mathematical and scientific minds, while also writing on religious and philosophical subjects. He died at age 39, in 1662. 

In a list of child prodigies, Judit Polgár is an interesting case. Her father, László, an educational psychologist, was convinced that exceptional mental abilities were less a result of inborn talent than of proper training. He claimed he could turn any child into a prodigy and even wrote a manual called Raise a Genius! His ideas may have sounded grandiose and outlandish at the time, but maybe less so when all three of László’s daughters—the test cases for his pedagogical vision—turned out to be chess prodigies. Raised in an environment of constant chess practice, the Polgár sisters rocked the male-dominated world of competitive chess, forcing many to question the widespread assumption that male players were naturally superior. The eldest daughter, Susan, became the top-ranked female player in the world at age 15, and in January 1991 she was the first woman ever to earn a grandmaster rank calculated on the same basis as male players.

But she was soon eclipsed by the youngest Polgár sister, Judit. In December 1991 the 15-year-old Judit became the youngest player ever to earn the rank of grandmaster, breaking the record set by Bobby Fischer in 1958. (Her record has since been broken several times.)  During her career, Judit avoided women’s-only events. Instead, she focused on playing the best male players in the world, often with great success. In 2005 she reached eighth in the ranking of the top players in chess, becoming the only woman ever to reach the top ten.