Other Amazing Memories

Other Famous Autistic Savants

John F. Nash Jr.

"Johnny was always different. [My parents] knew he was different. And they knew he was bright. He always wanted to do things his way. Mother insisted I do things for him, that I include him in my friendships. ... but I wasn't too keen on showing off my somewhat odd brother."

John F. Nash was born on June 13, 1928 as the son of a Father who was an electrical engineer and school teacher Mother. Like other children young John was sent to standard schools in his hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia. As a child he read a lot and at the age of ten was already into literature such as E.T. Bell’s “Men of Mathematics”. Upon graduation from High School he was accepted into Carnegie Tech. in Pittsburg with a full scholarship where he majored in Chemical engineering. After a series of academic shifts John finally dedicated himself to majoring in mathematics. After graduating from Carnegie he was accepted to Princeton where he continued to study mathematics as a graduate student. He did some very influential work in the mathematical field and in 1994 shared the Nobel Prize with John C. Harsanyi and Richard Selten for what he claimed was some of his “most trivial work”. In 1958 he was struck with paranoid schizophrenia which resulted in him loosing his job a year later and was virtually incapacitated for nearly the next two decades. As the disease diminished in the early 70’s he gradually returned to his work in mathematics. A fellow student described Nash in in the following way:

“He was a country boy unsophisticated even by our standards. He behaved oddly, playing a single chord on the piano over and over, leaving a melting ice cream cone melting on the top of his cast off clothing, walking on his roommate’s sleeping body to turn off the light.”

J. Thomas Bethune/Blind Tom

"The blind negro Tom has been performing here to a crowded house....He performs many pieces of his own conception-- one, his may be called picturesque and sublime, a true conception of unaided, blind musical genius.... This poor blind boy is cursed with but little of human nature; he seems to be an unconscious agent acting as he is acted on, and his mind a vacant receptacle where Nature's stores her jewels to recall them at her pleasure."

Born on May 25, 1849 to slave parents Domingo Wiggins and Charity Greene, Thomas Wiggins’ life was altered by his blindness from birth. During these years his only signs of human intelligence were his interest in sounds and his uncanny ability to mimic them. As an infant Thomas’ parents had been bought by James Bethune of Columbus, Georgia. As was custom of the day female slaves and children retained the surname of their owner so Tom Wiggins became Tom Bethune. The Bethune household included seven musically gifted children who sang and played the piano. After hearing the music on the piano Tom would later sit down and replay the sequence of chords he had heard. At the age of six Tom began improvising and creating his own music and at the age of eight performed his first concert. One of his piano teachers later reported that it took Tom an hour to learn what most other musicians would became skilled at in years. Tom could perform many classics but could also sit facing away from the keyboard and play an exact repetition of any piece with his hands on the opposite keys that they normally played. Blind Tom toured all over the US giving prestigious performances and eventually his repertoire grew to seven thousand works. Tom died of cerebral apoplexy at the age of 59 in Hoboken, New Jersey. His first slave owners became rich because of Tom but he lived and died penniless.

Gilles Trehin

Gilles Trehin was born in Cagnes sur Mer in south-eastern France in 1972. Fascinated by big cities and airplanes he began drawing at the age of five. At the age of six he could answer the multiplication table for the 12, 13, and 14 th multiplications and only stopped because he didn’t know what to do beyond 1,000. That same year he discovered the concept of a prime number all by himself. At the age of eight he was diagnosed with autism. Between 1978 and 1981 while living in the United States he developed the idea of an imaginary city named Urville. In 1984 he began drawing models of the city which were first constructed out of Lego Blocks and model airplanes. He has presently drawn both plans and landscapes of Urville and also created culture, economy, geography and history for the city.