Show STUDENT LIFE on the “Theory of the Form of the Earth” and at the age of eighteen he produced a proof of Newton’s theorem “that every cubic is a projection of one of five divergent parabolas” Carl Gauss the son of a Brunswick bricklayer exhibited almost At the age of equal precocity eighteen he determined a method of inscribing in a circle a regular polygon of seventeen sides and the whole theory of quadratics was and worked out independently proved bv him when lie was only seventeen years old Pascal as a boy labored under His difficulties extraordinary father was determined that the lad should devote his entire time to Greek and Latin and in order to promote this purpose he kept all books bearing on mathematics away from his son But young Pascal was a natural mathematiHe develcian and investigator oped independently a system of geometry At the age of twelve he demonstrated the theorem that the sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles although at that time he had never opened a text book on mathematics and perhaps had never heard of Euclid At the age of sixteen he wrote the most complete and comprehensive treatise on conic sections that had appeared up to that time But let us look into other fields of mental activity Not all precocious youngsters are mathemati 'Z15 Thomas Chatterton our eighteenth century poet was a youthful prodigy As a child his chief characteristic was stupidity At the age of eight years he was sent home from school with the statement from his teacher that it was impossible for voung Chatter-to- n to learn the alphabet But the boy had a mania for relics of antiquity he became interested in an old black letter Bible and from that volume he learned to read Soon his fertile imagination began to find expression in works of fiction and his love for the antique became more intense He stained parchment with ocre to give it the appearance of age covered the sheets with peculiar hieroglyphics claimed that it was an ancient historic record and that he had found the same in the basement of an old church and then proceeded to translate it into modern English Chatterton found among his manuscripts the record of a certain family (Burgum) back to the time of the Norman Conquest He translated this and sold it to Air Bur gum fpr a fair price Even Horace Walpole and Gray came very nearly being deceived by the boy when he offered to sell them a translation of an ancient manuscript on the History of Art Aside from this work Chatterton wrote the Rowley poems which are still valued as literary productions He was a child of poverty but in spite of the fact that he had to work hard to support himself he found time to write volumes Fear- cians |