Favor With God And Man Series

And then there was in the 19th century the famous John Stewart Mill. He was often called a manufactured genius. He was the product of an educational experiment that reads like a record of medieval torture. His irritable father was a historian and philosopher named James Mill. He forced his son to learn Greek at three, history at four, Latin, geometry and algebra by eight. By twelve he had read Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terrance, Cicero, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides and Demosthenes—all in Greek. His father required him to write English verse and educate his younger siblings. John Stewart Mill eventually became a world-renowned philosopher.

And then there was also living on into the beginning of the 20th century, Truman Henry Safford, son of a Vermont farmer. He showed his precocity at age three when his parents amused themselves with his calculating powers. At seven he studied algebra and geometry. At nine he constructed and published an almanac. At ten he originated a new rule for obtaining moon risings and settings in one quarter of the time of previous methods. At aged ten he was asked to square the number, that is, to multiply it by itself, the number 365,365,365,365,365,365. He gave the correct answer in less than a minute. I’m not going to read you the 40 numbers that make up the answer. Obviously he was smart. He graduated from Harvard at the age of 18.

By the way, are you thinking of removing the bumper sticker from your car?

Further into the 20th century there is William James Sidis, son of a Harvard psychology professor who used to use his child to prove that children could master very complex subjects at a young age. At six months he knew his ABC’s. At two years he read adult books. He was in to advanced mathematics at three, and mastered French by four. At eight he graduated from high school. After independent study in Greek, Latin, German, Russian, French, Turkish and Armenian, he entered Harvard at 11 where he lectured the Harvard mathematical society on fourth-dimensional bodies.

And then there was Joel Kupperman, born in 1936. He was the most famous of the famous radio quiz kids of the 1940’s. At five he sent the show an application in which he mentioned his ability to do 98 or 99 times any number in his head immediately. Asked during an audition to multiply 24 by 98, he answered, “That would be 2,352.” When asked how he got the number so fast, he replied in his soon-to-be-famous lisp, “Dat is a sequet twick.” The twick, which involved working to the nearest zero, he had discovered himself. His IQ was in excess of 200; it was not measurable. At five he had the highest general mental development of any child ever tested by the Chicago Public Schools. He eventually received his Ph.D. at Cambridge. He’s now on the faculty at the University of Connecticut and publishes scholarly books and articles.

Michael Gross born in 1954, and was the son of a credit union manager in Lansing, Michigan. He astounded his mother by reading aloud to her without any previous instruction. His IQ is so high it can’t be measured. He was obviously under-challenged at school. At age four, on his first day in Kindergarten, he saw a class mate coloring an apple blue. He remarked with interest, “That’s the kind of approach Picasso would use.” At ten he moved directly from fifth grade to Michigan State University. He became the youngest college freshman in nearly a century, graduated with a Ph.D. finally from Yale before he was 20.