20 Famous Prodigies You Never Knew About

Child prodigy Kim Ung-Yong, the man with the world's highest IQ was fluent in 4 languages by the age of 4 and began attending university the same year.

Flavor Flav is a musical prodigy. By the time, he started performing with Public Enemy, he was proficient in 15 different instruments, from drums to oboe.

László Polgár is a Hungarian psychologist who believed “geniuses are not born, they are made.” He raised all 3 of his daughters to play chess every day. All 3 became chess prodigies and grandmasters.

Michael Kearney, a child prodigy spoke his first words at 4 months and graduated college with a degree in Anthropology at 10 years old. 

A math prodigy named George Green operated a windmill for 20 years. Almost completely self-taught, he could not attend university until almost 40 years old. Green nonetheless graduated from Cambridge as one of the top math students; Einstein later said that he was 20 years ahead of his time.

There is a blind, autistic musical prodigy named Derek Paravicini who can play anything he hears but can barely count 10.

William James Sidis, a child prodigy who was thought to have been the smartest man who ever lived, escaped the limelight and worked blue collar jobs, secretly writing thousands of manuscripts that have never been read.

Brandenn E. Bremmer was a musical prodigy who taught himself to read at 18 months and played the piano at the age of 3. He completed high school at the age of 10 and committed suicide at the age of 14.

A 16-year-old (as of 2019) Canadian tech prodigy named Tanmay Bakshi started using computers at the age of 5, launched his first app at the age of 9, and has been working with IBM’s AI and cognitive APIs for a couple of years now.

A child prodigy named Christian Heinrich Heineken by at the age of 1, read the Pentateuch, and by the age of 4 wrote the "History of Denmark" and recited it when visiting the King of Denmark later the same year.