15 Most Famous Child Geniuses

By siliconindia | Friday, 08 March 2013, 13:17 Hrs

#12 William Rowan Hamilton

Mastering Latin, Greek and Hebrew by the age of five, William Rowan Hamilton showed his intellectual abilities at an early age. At the age of 13, the future mathematician was fluent in 13 different languages, including Sanskrit, Perian, Italian, Arabic, Syriac and Indian dialects.

While he still continues his studies as a university student, he was appointed Professor of Astronomy, Director of the Dunsink Observatory and the Royal Astronomer of Ireland. His contributions include a theory of dynamics and quaternions, a technique used for three-dimensional space in mathematics.

#11 Shakuntala Devi

Born to a lion tamer father, Shakuntala Devi started her relationship with numbers through card tricks at the age of three playing with her father. Known to be “Human Computer” and “Hindu Mathematical Wizardess”, she demonstrated her mathematical abilities at the University of Mysore and Annamalai University as a child.

She was mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records, for her talent several times, especially when she extracted the 23^rd root of a 201-digit number mentally and even when she found the cube root of 332,812,557 in seconds. Later in 2006, she published a story about a girl fascinated with digits and numerals “In the Wonderland of Numbers”.