Volume 31, Number 4 · March 15, 1984
Quiz Kids
By Martin Gardner
The Great Mental Calculators: The Psychology, Methods, and Lives of Calculating Prodigies, Past and Present
by Steven B. Smith
Columbia University Press, 374 pp., $25.00
In Brunswick, Germany, in 1780, a stonemason was calculating the wages due his workmen at the end of the week. Watching was his three-year-old son. 'Father,' said the child, 'the reckoning is wrong.' The boy gave a different total which, to everyone's surprise, was correct. No one had taught the lad any arithmetic. The father had hoped his son would become a bricklayer, but the boy, Carl Friedrich Gauss, thanks to his mother's encouragement, became one of the greatest mathematicians in history.
Review, 2867 words
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