When not reading or writing, Lovecraft spent his childhood amassing enough crushing trauma that writing stories about the incomprehensible alien horror of the universe probably felt like a lighthearted escape.īefore the age of 12, Picasso had a total grasp of the fundamentals of art and was producing photo-realistic anatomical sketches, and in his teens he was already considered to be a mature artist who was producing significant works. One of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century, Howard Phillips Lovecraft learned to read at the age of two and was writing complex poetry by the age of six (we'd be especially impressed if he found a rhyme for 'Cthulhu'). We entered 55378008 into our calculators so many times we'd burned it into the screen. Hell, Sidis could probably get a girl's panties off from across the room with the sheer power of his mind. It's unfortunate because nothing gets the ladies hot and bothered like a dissertation on the theory of cosmological reversibility. Despite his brilliance in the fields of mathematics and cosmology, we do have to question Sidis' intelligence in one key area as he took a vow of celibacy his entire life and likely died a virgin. Sidis could read at 18 months, had written four books and was fluent in eight languages at age seven, gave a lecture a Harvard at nine and entered Harvard at 11.
