Daddy's little genius

We all like to think our children are gifted. So when I read this week about Mikhail Ali, the three-year-old English boy who has just been admitted to Mensa, I couldn't resist making comparisons.

Apparently, Mikhail can already add and subtract four-digit numbers, and is learning multiplication. Not only that but, sometimes, according to his mother, "when he thinks we're testing him, he'll spell words backwards to show off".

If I remember correctly, when my son Patrick was three, sometimes he would wear his underpants backwards to show off. Even when we weren't testing him. He would come down playground slides backwards too, to his mother's horror. But only the blinkered pride of a parent persuades me that he could have competed mentally with this Ali kid, who has mastered both the English and Arabic alphabets and can read such words as "information", "elephant", and "sundries" (a term he picked up from his Indian takeaway).

As British Mensa's youngest member, he succeeds a four-year-old who was said to have had "a vocabulary of 70 words" by his first birthday. Announcing the new kid on the block, a Mensa spokeswoman said infants were still rare in the organisation, but, provided he brought a parent along, Mikhail would be welcome at "our social events". You'd wonder about those social events. Do sophisticated toddlers stand around eating finger food while exchanging sundry information about elephants, some of it backwards? Maybe not.

The news about the three-year-old made me dig out a newspaper cutting from last year about the "Mozart of Chess", Norwegian prodigy Magnus Carlsen. Magnus had just become, at 13, the second-youngest Grand Master ever, thanks partly to a photographic memory. The Daily Telegraph's chess correspondent described his precocious talent: "When he was five years old, his father's favourite party trick was to ask him to recite the names and populations of the 430 districts of Norway, which he could do without a single error." You can imagine how popular the Carlsens' parties must have been. I'd say there were a few polite refusals by the time Magnus turned six: "I'd love to come, but - you know how it is - I have a prior appointment that day to have some of my teeth removed without anaesthetic." Remarkably, and despite his ability to recite the names and populations of the 430 districts of Norway, Magnus was said to get on well with children of his own age. By way of stressing his normality, the Telegraph said he had been spotted "playing football while waiting for an opponent to resign". Interestingly, the parents of Mikhail Ali also mentioned their son's fondness for football. Which reminds us that academic intelligence is not everything. David Beckham and Wayne Rooney were child prodigies too - although, based on post-match interviews, if you pooled their vocabularies, you might be struggling to break 70 words even now.

It's generally thought that geniuses are born rather than made. But chess provides a counter-argument in Hungary's Judit Polgar, the world's top female player, still spoken of as a potential world champion. The daughter of a psychologist who believed that anyone could excel in any discipline given intensive training from an early age, Judit and her two older sisters received a hothouse education at home. Chess was their father's random choice. Both parents gave up work to oversee the project. The girls spent eight hours a day practising. The rest of the time was devoted to languages and some sports, and, although there were also short sessions set aside for "jokes", there was no time for toys or friends. The experiment was very controversial in 1970s Budapest; at one point, the communist authorities talked of committing Mr Polgar to a mental institution. And some might say that the communists had a point.

But the psychologist prevailed, and although all three girls became chess stars, Judit shone brightest. By the age of five, she was beating her father (only at chess, I hasten to add), and soon afterwards established players were falling to this "cute little auburn-haired monster who crushed you". She was the first girl to win the World Boys' Under-12 Championship, and at 15 she deposed Bobby Fischer to become the then youngest-ever Grand Master.

Even if she never becomes overall champion - and, at 28, she's getting on a bit now - she has already proved her father's theory about genius. Yet arguably her most impressive achievement was to grow up normal. There's nothing about her playing football, anywhere, but opponents agree that, behind the killer mentality, she's sweet, charming, and fun to be with. It must have been the joke sessions that saved her.