His four children - Frank, into revolutionary politics and bombing; Reef, a reckless tunnel blaster wandering the Balkans as Europe shudders into war; Lake, who marries her father's assassin, and Kit, a Yale -and Gottingen-educated mathematical prodigy preoccupied with arcane and unsolvable formulae - take up the question of vengeance with varying degrees of dedication.
This engrossing biography charts Wren's trajectory from mathematical prodigy who invented transparent beehives and a copying machine to England's greatest architect, who rebuilt much of London — most famously St . Pauls Cathedral — after the Great Fire of 1666.
During his teenage years in Königsberg he met and befriended another young mathematical prodigy, David Hilbert, with whom he worked closely both at Königsberg and later at the University of Göttingen.
He had become fascinated by a paper that had been written, in 1943, by Warren S. McCulloch, a neurophysiologist, and Walter Pitts, a mathematical prodigy.
In Stuart: A Life Backwards he brilliantly traced the life of a homeless alcoholic; in Simon: The Genius in my Basement he told the story of his one-time landlord, a mathematical prodigy, who turned into a messy recluse and fanatical collector of public transport timetables.
In a 1990 journal article about Ms. Devi, Arthur R. Jensen, a researcher on human intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that unlike the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie "Rain Man," an autistic savant who was also a mathematical prodigy, "Devi comes across as alert, extroverted, affable and articulate".
She was about 3 and playing cards with her father when he discovered that she was a mathematical prodigy with an uncanny ability to memorize numbers.
Born in 1632, he was, to begin with, a mathematical prodigy -- Isaac Newton considered him one of the three greatest practitioners of geometry of his time.
Starting this month Broadway audiences will get to see her in a very different role: as the 19th-century mathematical prodigy Thomasina in Tom Stoppard's brainy 1993 comedy "Arcadia".
