He was born in 1889, the youngest of eight children reared by an aging Confederate veteran who had moved north after the war, to a farm in downstate Illinois, seventy miles east of St. Louis. His family called him June, short for Junior, and he was barely walking when his parents realized his intelligence bordered on that of a prodigy. In later years his siblings swore he could read the newspapers aloud at the age of three. His capacity for mathematics became a local legend; people marveled how the child could multiply large sums in his head. Early on, June’s math skill manifested itself in a
...more
