Who is a prodigy? A prodigy is someone who is a master in something. Prodigies are more unusual because they are individuals who are masters of one or more skills or arts at an early age. Is there something that parents or nurture can do to help a child become the best he or she can be? We believe so – the first step is to identify your child’s gifts and talents, every interest if nurtured right has the ability to become a top skill. Here is just a list of 10 modern child prodigies in various fields in the world.
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Saheela Ibraheem
At just 15 years old, Nigerian American Saheela Ibraheem was accepted into Harvard University, which makes her among the youngest students ever to attend that school. But that’s not the most impressive part, Saheela was accepted at 12 other colleges, including MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Saheela’s parents, totally supportive of the young scholar, sometimes taught her subjects the schools didn’t offer.
2. Tanishq Matthew Abraham
Tanishq Matthew Abraham is among the youngest members of Mensa, which he joined when he was four years old. He started to show his genius at four months, when he began browsing children’s books and correctly answering questions about them. Upon entering Mensa, he scored a high 99.9 percentile on the standardized IQ test of Mensa. At five years old, he finished the math courses offered by Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth on five levels (kindergarten to 5th grade) in just six months.At six years old, he is already taking high school and college courses. He has maintained a grade point average of 4.0 in all of his college courses and was one of the youngest to be inducted in the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. He also publishes essays on NASA’s Lunar Science website.
3. Ethan Bortnick
Ethan is a musician, songwriter, and actor. When he was three years old, he began playing the keyboard and at age five, he began composing music. His debut performance was on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2007, and he has had numerous performances thereafter. He is a proud Guiness World Record holder as the world’s youngest solo musician to headline his own tour. He is also the youngest headliner to ever play Las Vegas, which he did at the age of 10.
4. Akim Camara
He a violinist prodigy in Berlin.He began playing the violin at the age of two and displayed a remarkable memory in the music he heard while still in diapers and speaking unintelligible toddler gibberish. His instructor noted his natural “ear for music” and began teaching the two-year-old twice a week. He learned to play exceptionally quickly after only six months of training, and made his debut performance in December 2003—at the age of three—at a Christmas concert
5. Priyanshi Somani
Priyanshi is a mental calculator from India.She started mental calculation at the age of six, and by age 11 she was the youngest participant at the Mental Calculation World Cup of 2010—which she won. She won first place by solving the square root of 10 six-digit numbers in a record-breaking 6 minutes 51 seconds. To top it off, she was the only participant to have 100 percent accuracy in addition, multiplication, and square roots in the history of the competition.
6. Zuriel Oduwole
Zuriel is a Nigerian American who at 14-years-old is a Filmmaker, and has interviewed 19 presidents including President Buhari. She has been listed in the New African Magazine‘s list of “100 Most Influential People in Africa” thus making her the youngest person of African descent to achieve such feat. She has also interviewed Africa’s richest person Aliko Dangote and tennis super stars – Venus and Serena Williams. She makes the case for education the Girl Child in Africa and Emerging Markets.
7. Jacob Barnett
Jacob Barnett is an American mathematician. When he was two years old, he was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism. Doctors said that he might not be able to talk, read, become independent in basic daily activities. Jacob proved the doctors wrong when he was able to recite the alphabet forwards and backwards—at three years old. At the same age, while visiting a planetarium, Jacob answered the presenter’s question of why the moons of Mars are oddly shaped. He enrolled at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis at age 10. He is currently working on his PhD in Quantum Physics.
8. Cameron Thompson
Cameron Thompson is a math prodigy from north Wales. When he was four years old, he corrected his teacher about her claim that zero is the lowest number, saying she forgot negative numbers. He began studying his degree in mathematics at the Open University at age 11. And at the same age, he passed two GCSEs in math and GCE Advanced Level math with flying colors, and was featured in BBC’s “The Growing Pains of a Teenage Genius.” He has difficulties in his studies because of his Asperger’s Syndrome, but undoubtedly, Cameron is a mathematical genius
9. Taylor Ramon Wilson
Taylor Ramon Wilson is the youngest person in the world to build a working fusor: a device designed to create nuclear fusion. He built a bomb at age 10 and the fusor at age 14. In May 2011, he won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his radiation detector. In February 2013, he spoke at the TED 2013 conference about his ideas on self-contained underground nuclear fission reactors. He designed a compact nuclear reactor that he said would generate 50 megawatts of power and would need to be refuelled only once every 30 years.
10. Esther Okade
When you take a look at Esther Okade a 10 year old British-Nigerian, she will strike you like the average young girl of her age. What then makes her exceptional is that this young whiz is presently an undergraduate at the Open University, a UK based distance learning college. Her mum noticed her flare for figures after she started being home schooled at three. She sat for her first Math GSCE exam, a British high school qualification at six.
