Terence Tao, born on July 17, 1975, in Adelaide, Australia, displayed exceptional mathematical abilities from an early age and was considered a child prodigy. He mastered arithmetic at age 2 and entering high school at the age of 7, where he studied calculus. By the age of 14, he had become the youngest gold medalist in the history of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). He earned his bachelor’s degree at 16, his Ph.D. at 21 and was awarded a Fields Medal at age 31.
Tao is a modern example of a person gifted with a high IQ and an innate ability to learn at a prodigious rate. Throughout history, there have been several examples of people with the ability to learn at rates significantly faster than average. John von Neumann, born on December 28, 1903, in Budapest, Hungary, was readily recognized as a child prodigy, possessing an eidetic memory, and at age 6, displaying the ability to divide two eight-digit numbers in his head. His family often entertained guests with demonstrations of his prodigious memory. The guests would randomly select a page from a telephone book for John to scan, and when he had committed a column of names and numbers to memory they would quiz him, and be astounded by his accurate recall.
In 1911, at the age of 7 John entered the Lutheran Gymnasium, a prestigious school, where his high intellectual acuity was immediately recognized. He was given a special tutor and by age 8, he had become proficient in calculus. His interest in mathematics eventually resulted in his writing a dissertation on set theory for which he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Budapest at the age of 22. In 1928, he published his seminal paper The Axiomatization of Set Theory, and was one of the first to perceive the importance of Gödel’s completeness theorems. Throughout his career, von Neumann contributed to many branches of mathematics, including the founding of Game Theory. He is also considered by many to be the father of the modern programmable computer.
William Rowan Hamilton, born on August 4, 1805 in Dublin, Ireland, from an early age, displayed a special proclivity for languages. By age 13 he had acquired, a high degree of fluency in about a dozen Indo-European languages. By the time he was 16 years old, William had mastered most of Newton’s Principia, having already absorbed Newton’s Arithmetica Universalis. By age 18, he was accepted at Trinity College in Dublin, subsequently scoring the top grade in every subject in every year achieving a BA degree in both classics and mathematics. In 1827, at age 22, he was appointed, over other highly-esteemed astronomers, Andrews Professor of Astronomy and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He is known today as the discoverer of quaternions.
These are merely three biographical sketches of people of supremely gifted IQ whose accomplishments at an early age stand as proof that human brains differ significantly in the rate at which they can learn. While educational opportunity, tutelage, and environment can foster the development of such gifts, the genetic component of this intellectual capability is incontestable.
