8 Child Prodigies So Amazing They'll Ruin Your Day

Ah, childhood. It's a magical time when you're still allowed to be a non-productive drain on society and not feel guilty about it. But while most of us spent our childhoods staring at cartoons over bowls of sugary breakfast cereal, some kids were more focused on things like composing symphonies, performing surgery or getting nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Here are some child prodigies who, to put it mildly, make us look like worthless turds.

This kid, India's youngest ever university student and physician, makes Doogie Howser look like an unmotivated slob. "Oh that's cute," you say. "They're letting him play doctor." Play nothing, this kid was performing operations when he was seven. He also has quite the pint-sized ego on him.

"People saw my potential and wanted to help me excel in life," Akrit has said. "I think they're of above average intelligence, but not as clever as me." Doesn't it just make you want to smack the little scamp?

Although if Akrit's current work on a cure for cancer turns out to be successful he can spend all day shouting about how smart he is into a golden megaphone for all we care. That said, Akrit has also claimed he's going to make a dinosaur, so we'll believe he has the cure for cancer when he rides down the street with it on a stegosaurus.

What we were doing at that age:
Through painstaking research held during recess we were discovering the difference between boys and girls (beside the other side's debilitating cootie levels of course). Also we knew that the Ninja Turtle Band-Aids totally made our scraped knees heal faster.

Some of you may have heard of this guy. Mozart is not only one of the greatest composers of all time, but probably history's most recognized child prodigy. There's not an elementary school music room that doesn't have a poster of Mozart up listing his early accomplishments in order to shame the kids into playing "Hot Cross Buns" on their recorders instead of using them as lightsabers or spitball cannons.

Mozart learned to play the piano at the age of four, composed his first pieces at five and at eight, an age when most us probably couldn't even name half a dozen musical instruments if asked, Mozart wrote his first symphony. Young Mozart was quite the little celebrity, but sadly the fate of child stars was about the same then as it is now as his tumultuous life would end up lasting a mere 35 years.

It's proof the universe is fundamentally unfair that Mozart died so young while today we still have to put up with Danny Bonaduce. That'll teach us to invent a cure for syphilis.

What we were doing at that age:
We didn't have time to be composing symphonies since we were too busy constructing our own instruments.

We called it a dandruffone

Some consider William James Sidis the smartest man who ever lived, with an estimated IQ of 250 to 300. For the sake of comparison, you only have to have an IQ of 136 to be a mere run of the mill genius, and your average person is somewhere in the 85 to 115 range. Surprisingly pictures of Sidis reveal that his head was only marginally bigger than average and not a throbbing translucent beach ball-sized dome. Word is he wasn't even capable of shooting psychic death rays.

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. 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.

It's unfortunate because nothing gets the ladies hot and bothered like a dissertation on the theory of cosmological reversibility. Hell, Sidis could probably get a girl's panties off from across the room with the sheer power of his mind. A sad waste.

What we were doing at that age:
We entered 55378008 into our calculators so many times we'd burned it into the screen.

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"). 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.

Young Lovecraft was sickly and spent much of his childhood in bed, being told horror stories by his eccentric grandfather Whipple (whose ridiculous name was about as funny as Lovecraft's childhood got). Lovecraft's parents were proof lunatics attract, as his father was a syphilitic psychotic and his mother was a chronically depressed, frail, ghostly pale woman (she was likely being slowly poisoned by arsenic-based syphilis treatments).

His father would die paralyzed in an asylum, his grandfather would follow leaving the family destitute and then his mother would go, passing away in the same hospital Lovecraft's father died in to complete the tragedy trifecta. If all this wasn't bad enough every night when Lovecraft went to bed the very shadows around him would form into the monstrous black tentacles of a long lost burning-eyed god who would try to drag his body down to the depths of hell itself.

Well, he probably thought they did.

What we were doing at that age:
We'd authored the little known classic "The Ghostbusters meet Batman and GI Joe". We were also masters at the art of the Mad-Lib.