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Child Prodigies

Amazing contributions to music, literature, and academics do not rest solely upon the shoulders of wise and learned men. History remembers those brilliant and talented young people who displayed astounding abilities before adulthood. Following are four of whom you might not have heard:

Born in Milan in 1718, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, unlike many child prodigies and women of her era, lived a long life 80 years. The oldest of 21 children, Agnesi spoke both Italian and French at five years old and added Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin by the time she turned 11. Recognized as brilliant even at that tender age, she tutored her younger brothers and delivered an hour-long speech in Latin to an audience of distinguished intellectuals at the age of nine. The topic: education for women. In her teens, she studied ballistics and geometry and maintained academic correspondence with the most learned scholars in Bologna. A devout Roman Catholic, she entered semi-retirement in a convent and devoted her time to the study of mathematics, including differential and integral calculus. Read her treatise Analytical Institutions in Four Books: Originally Written in Italian.

Johann-Philippe Baratier, born in 1721, lived only 19 years. In that time, the German scholar published 11 works and wrote many more manuscripts not published during his short lifetime. Educated by his father, a Huguenot minister, he read Greek and spoke French, Latin, and Dutch by the age of five. By the age of eight, he had mastered Hebrew and translated the Hebrew Bible into French. The Royal Academy of Berlin accepted him at the age of 14 while he worked on a method to calculate longitude at sea. When he died, he had focused his studies on the history of the Jewish people and Egyptian antiquities.

William James Sidis entered the world in 1898, and astonished the intellectual community when Harvard University accepted him at the age of 11. As an adult, he claimed fluency in over 40 languages, although that and other such boasts were later recognized as gross exaggerations or outright lies. Feted for his exceptional mathematical abilities, Sidis’ fame as a child prodigy faded, replaced by withdrawal from public life and a reputation for eccentricity. He died in 1944 at the age of 46.

Like many child prodigies, Évariste Galois (1811 - 1832) died young. At the age of 12, he entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, but soon grew bored until he discovered geometry. His instructors grew disappointed with his lackluster academic performance and, in 1828, he was twice denied admission to the École Polytechnique, France’s most prestigious institution for mathematics. A political firebrand, Galois joined the French National Guard in 1831, spent time in prison for his revolutionary political activity, and died from wounds taken in a duel of honor involving a woman. Galois clinched his claim to fame when he solved a mathematical problem that had stumped the best minds in Europe for 350 years. His work laid the foundation for Galois theory, group theory, two major branches of algebra, and Galois connections. Read the Galois’ works in Manuscrits de Évariste Galois.

By Karen M. Smith