Was Beethoven A Child Prodigy

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The Austrian-born wunderkind beginning took upward the harpsichord when he was just 3 years old. He composed his first piece of published music at age 5, and by his teen years, he had already written several concertos, sonatas, operas and symphonies. Mozart and his sister Maria Anna—herself a musical prodigy—traveled widely through Europe exhibiting their talents in majestic courts and public concerts. From Bavaria to Paris, audiences marveled at the boy wonder'due south ability to improvise and play the piano blindfolded or with one paw crossed over the other. During a 1764 stopover in London, he was even tested and examined by a British lawyer and naturalist named Daines Barrington, who was awestruck by the 8-year-old's ability to sight-read unfamiliar music "in a virtually masterly way." Mozart would eventually grow into one of Europe's near celebrated and prolific composers. Earlier his untimely expiry at age 35, he wrote more than 600 pieces of music.

2. Enrico Fermi

Before his work on radioactivity won him the Nobel Prize and helped usher in the nuclear historic period, Enrico Fermi was considered a mathematics and physics prodigy. The Italian republic native showed signs of having a photographic memory every bit a boy, and by age 10 he was spending his free time mulling over geometric proofs and edifice electrical motors. Afterwards his brother died unexpectedly in 1915, 13-year-former Enrico dealt with his grief past burial himself in books on trigonometry, physics and theoretical mechanics. He then practical to the University of Pisa in 1918, wowing the admissions panel with a doctoral-level essay that solved the partial differential equation of a vibrating rod. Fermi achieved his post-secondary caste from the school several years early at the historic period of just 21. He afterwards conducted groundbreaking experiments in neutron bombardment and nuclear concatenation reactions before becoming i of the lead physicists on the Manhattan Projection—the secret research program that adult the atomic bomb.

3. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Born in United mexican states in 1651, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz learned to read as a toddler and quickly blazed through all the books in her gramps's library. Despite beingness denied a formal educational activity because of her gender, she began writing religious poetry at age 8 and afterward taught herself Latin, supposedly mastering it in just 20 lessons. By her adolescence, she had as well studied Greek logic and learned an Aztec language called Nahuatl. Juana'south reputation for genius afterward won her a place as a lady-in-waiting at the viceroy's court in Mexico Metropolis. When she was 17, she was famously tested past a panel of xl university professors, all of whom were shocked past her deep knowledge of philosophy, mathematics and history. The sometime child prodigy entered a convent at historic period 20 and spent the residual of her life as a cloistered nun. She continued her studies, even so, and eventually established herself equally one of the 17th century's about popular authors of drama, verse and prose. Her image now appears on the 200-peso bill in United mexican states.

4. Pablo Picasso

Equally the son of a painter, Pablo Picasso had a castor in his hand from an early on age. The hereafter fine art legend could reportedly draw before he could talk, and his mother claimed that when he finally spoke, his kickoff words were to ask for a pencil. Picasso made his get-go oil painting when he was 9 years old. His skills presently surpassed those of his father, and at age 14, he was admitted to a prestigious Barcelona art school. Just a twelvemonth later, he completed "Start Communion," an astonishingly mature piece of work that was displayed in a public exhibition. The painting was among the first of the more than than 22,000 artworks that Picasso would produce in his eight-decade career. "When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you lot become a monk you'll end up as the pope,'" he afterwards said. "Instead, I became a painter and wound upward every bit Picasso."

Scroll to Go on

five. Blaise Pascal

Born in 1623 in France, Blaise Pascal spent his youth being privately tutored at home by his begetter. The elder Pascal banished mathematics texts from the house to ensure the boy first focused on languages, merely by age 12, young Blaise had secretly invented his ain terminology and independently discovered most all the geometric proofs of Euclid. His mathematical genius only grew from there. At xvi, he produced an essay on conic sections so avant-garde that the famed philosopher Rene Descartes was convinced his father must have ghostwritten it; by 19, he had designed and built a mechanical calculator known as the "Pascaline." Pascal went on to publish papers and conduct experiments on everything from fluid mechanics and perpetual motion to atmospheric pressure and the philosophy of religion. Before his death at the age of 39, he developed his famous "Pascal's Wager," which uses probability theory to argue for belief in God.

half-dozen. Arthur Rimbaud

Vagabond poet Arthur Rimbaud is often held upwards as one of history'due south few examples of a literary prodigy. An honour-winning student, the Frenchman published his first work in 1870 at the age of fifteen before running away to Paris and making his proper name as a writer and rabble-rouser. Rimbaud produced his early masterpiece "The Drunken Gunkhole" when he was just 16. He followed it upwards three years later with "A Season in Hell," a hallucinatory prose poem that helped set the stage for the surrealist movement. Forth the mode, he engaged in a drug and alcohol-fueled dearest affair with boyfriend poet Paul Verlaine and won plaudits from the likes of Victor Hugo, who supposedly dubbed him "an infant Shakespeare." While Rimbaud's work would later influence Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and many others, the teen phenom stopped writing altogether at historic period 20. He subsequently roamed through the Middle East and Africa and worked every bit a trader and gunrunner before dying from cancer at age 37.

7. Clara Schumann

German-born musician Clara Schumann didn't speak until age 4, but past the time she was 7 she was already spending up to three hours a twenty-four hours mastering the piano. She began composing her own pieces at 10, and made her concert debut in 1830 at the age of 11. In 1831, Schumann embarked on the first of several tours of Europe, where she won acclaim from the likes of Chopin and Liszt and astonished audiences with her ability to play from memory. The young virtuoso later married fellow composer Robert Schumann in 1840, merely defied convention by continuing to write and perform even while raising her children. By the time she died in 1896, Schumann had spent six decades equally a professional musician and played more than i,300 public concerts.

8. Jean-Francois Champollion

The secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics might never have been revealed if not for the erstwhile child prodigy Jean-Francois Champollion. Born in France in 1790, he displayed a natural talent for languages from an early on age and went on to chief Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Sanskrit and Coptic by his mid-teens. Champollion presented his kickoff academic paper at 16, and by 19 he was already teaching history at a schoolhouse in Grenoble. In the early on 1820s, the young polyglot turned his attention toward deciphering the mysteries of the Rosetta Rock. He presently became the commencement philologist to recognize that the symbols of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were both pictographic and alphabetical—a breakthrough that proved to exist the key to cracking the lawmaking of a long-lost language.