They said that he had learned to read by age two. That he was fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, German, English, and French, that he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he was six, and that, during one summer, bored out of his mind after being locked in his father’s library because he had set his fencing teacher’s hair on fire, he had taught himself calculus and then committed to memory all forty-five volumes of Wilhelm Oncken’s General History. It turned out that all those things were true,
