Child prodigy
Zerah Colburn was the first of several children known as "mental calculators." Zerah was born in 1804 in Vermont. At age six, before he could read or write numbers, he could multiply a two-digit number by a two-digit number in his head. At age eight, he could compute 8 to the sixteenth power. His answer was 281,474,976,710,656. By the time he was 10 years old, Zerah's father took him to cities all over the United States to display his amazing abilities. He was also already well known in Europe. His abilities declined as he got older. Later he wrote an autobiography about his life and his unusual skills.