Child prodigy

A child prodigy, or simply prodigy, is someone who is a master of one or more skills or arts at an early age. One possible definition of a prodigy is a person who, by the age of 10, displays expert proficiency in a field usually only undertaken by adults. Some of the fields common to prodigies are mathematics, chess, art, and music, but prodigies occur in many other areas.

List of child prodigies

Art

• James Barry
• Akiane Kramarik
• Alexandra Nechita
• Dylan Scott Pierce
• Jim Shooter
• Drew Struzan
• Pablo Picasso

Music

• David Bowie
• Isaac Albeniz
• Tori Amos
• Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga
• Claudio Arrau
• Georges Bizet
• Bjork
• Kate Bush
• Sylvano Bussoti
• Han-na Chang
• Sarah Chang
• Frederic Chopin
• Steve Gadd - Sat in on professional drums at age 11.
• Judy Garland
• Boris Goldstein
• Midori Goto
• Louis Moreau Gottschalk
• Jay Greenberg
• Joseph Hassid
• Jascha Heifetz
• Józef Hofmann
• Michael Jackson
• Areti Ketime
• Evgeny Kissin
• Erich Wolfgang Korngold
• Lang Lang
• Franz Liszt
• Yo-Yo Ma
• Felix Mendelssohn
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Yehudi Menuhin
• Anne-Sophie Mutter
• Ervin Nyíregyházi
• David Oistrakh
• Leo Ornstein
• Jacqueline du Pré
• Michael Rabin
• Phil Ramone
• Ruggiero Ricci
• Buddy Rich - Began playing drums at 18 months old
• Arthur Rubenstein
• Jordan Rudess - Entered Julliard at 9 years old
• Camille Saint-Saëns
• Fazil Say
• Dmitri Shostakovich
• "Blind Tom" (Thomas Bethune Wiggins)
• Daniel Wnukowski
• Patrick Wolf
• Stevie Wonder
• Victor Wooten - Played first gig on bass at age 5.
• Bernie Worrell

Mathematics

• Maria Gaetana Agnesi
• Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz
• Zerah Colburn
• Erik Demaine
• Paul Erdős
• Leonhard Euler
• Charles Fefferman
• Evariste Galois
• Carl Friedrich Gauss
• Lord Kelvin
• Sofia Kovalevskaya
• Steven Baehr
• William Rowan Hamilton
• Ruth Lawrence
• John Von Neumann
• Blaise Pascal
• Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan
• Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller)
• Bernhard Riemann
• William James Sidis
• Terence Tao
• Norbert Wiener
• Stephen Wolfram

Physics

• John Bardeen
• William Lawrence Bragg-Youngest Nobel co-winner in Physics
• Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
• Richard Feynman
• Lev Landau - Entered University at 14. Pioneered Condensed matter, and "created" the Russian school of theoretical physics. Winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics
• Murray Gell-Mann - Taught himself calculus at seven. Went to Yale at 15 and received his PhD from MIT at 20. Winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics
• Julian Schwinger
• Tathagat Avatar Tulsi

Chess

:See chess prodigy.

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Literature

• Taylor Caldwell - wrote Romance of Atlantis when she was 12 or 13.
• Thomas Chatterton
• Vivien Greene - Book of poems published at 13
• S. E. Hinton
• Gordon Korman
• H. P. Lovecraft - recited poetry at age 2 and wrote long poems at age 5
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Mattie Stepanek
• Kristiano Ang- Published popular culture magazine Vainquer Teens at age 13
• Lesya Ukrainka
• Lope de Vega - wrote his first play at the age of 12. Read and wrote Latin in addition to his native Spanish at 5.
• Robert Clark Young - was reading and writing English and Spanish by age of five, wrote a novel at the age of 13 and submitted it to New York publishers before he was a freshman in high school, sold his first newspaper article at 14.

Medicine

• Balamurali Ambati
• Avicenna
• Sho Yano

Sport

• Freddy Adu
• Lebron James
• Jennifer Capriati
• Jean Carlos Chera
• Nadia Comaneci
• Jeff Gordon
• Wayne Gretzky
• Maria Sharapova
• Olga Korbut
• Michelle Kwan
• Sachin Tendulkar
• Ryan Sheckler
• Eric Lo Shih-kai - Youngest ever PGA tour golfer
• Kelly Slater
• Wayne Rooney
• Alan Shearer
• Shaun White
• Michelle Wie
• Tiger Woods

Academics

• Theodor Adorno
• Friedrich Adolf Ebert
• Michael Kearney
• Dong Qichang
• Alia Sabur - 15 year old Doctoral candidate at Drexel University.
• Gregory R. Smith

Mental calculators

Note: Several mathematicians were mental calculators when they were still children.

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• Shakuntala Devi
• Brian Greene

Computing

• Steve Kirsch - Wrote an e-mail program at the age of 12, (witnessed, participated in the birth of the internet), programmed IBM 360 mainframe.
• Steve Wozniak - Started developing complex electronics while still in grade 5. Went on to develop the worlds' first screen and keyboard desktop computer - Apple I.

Military

• David Farragut First Navy command at 12 years old.

Linguistics/Translation

• Jean-Francois Champollion

Politics

• Jeremy Bentham
• Nikolai Bukharin
• Stevens T. Mason
• Anna Lührmann
• John Stuart Mill
• Franklin Pierce
• William Pitt the Younger
• Richard Rush

Law

• Kiwi Alejandro Camara