īut Alexander's big break came when famed jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who's also the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, caught some of Alexander's YouTube videos and invited the then 8-year-old ingenue to play at the 2014 Jazz at Lincoln Center Gala. At 9, he entered the Master-Jam Fest, an all-ages jazz competition in Ukraine, and took home the grand prize. His family moved to Jakarta when Alexander was 8, by which time he was a big enough deal in Indonesian jazz circles to play for a visiting Herbie Hancock. His dad taught him some fundamentals, but the passion and dedication to jazz piano has been all Joey. Alexander got his first keyboard when he was 6 and started picking out a Thelonious Monk tune by ear.
Child piano prodigy on ellen full#
And third, he won't be 15 until June 2018.Īlexander's full name is Josiah Alexander Sila and he grew up in Bali, where his only exposure to jazz was a handful of CDs that his dad brought home from his time as a college student in the United States. Second, he's entirely self-taught (unless YouTube counts as a teacher).
First, he's from Indonesia, not exactly the capital of the jazz universe (or even on the map).
Joey Alexander is an unlikely jazz piano star.
Pianist Joey Alexander of the Joey Alexander Trio performs onstage at the Hollywood Bowl during the 38th Anniversary Playboy Jazz Festival in Hollywood, California in 2016. Lastly, von Neumann is also considered the father of game theory, a mathematical approach to economics that went on to influence the study of a range of fields, including evolutionary biology. He was also instrumental in building the first electronic general purpose computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1945, he achieved a major breakthrough in early computing by describing something called the "stored program technique," essentially solving the problem of having to build new hardware for every application. In 1943, von Neumann was recruited for the Manhattan Project, where he designed some of the most important elements of the first atomic bombs and even helped choose Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets. Įager to escape the mounting antisemitism of 1930s Europe, von Neumann took a position at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, where some dude named Albert Einstein was also a professor. Far from her machine-like nickname, Devi was an outgoing and warm person. She did it in 28 seconds, including the time required to write out the 26-digit solution. In 1980, her fame was immortalized when she made the Guinness World Records for the fastest multiplication of two 13-digit numbers. But one of her most memorable feats was in 1977, when she calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a Univac computer (an early computer) by 12 seconds. Another favorite trick was identifying the day of the week for any date in history. Her specialty was cube roots, which she could find for numbers in the trillions in a matter of seconds. She toured all over India and the world while growing up. And before long, the crowds came just to see Devi, with her father taking on a new role as her manager. By the time she was 6, she was performing regularly as part of her father's magic show, doing card tricks and calculations. (Fischer won.) His legacy stands as America's greatest chess champion and tragic reminder of the price of genius.ĭevi fell for numbers the way that other toddlers love toys and crayons. Later in life, he would disappear for years at a time and occasionally show up at international tournaments.įischer died in exile in Iceland at 64 years old, a fugitive from American officials for playing an unsanctioned chess tournament in Yugoslavia against Spassky for $5 million in 1992. He joined the fringe Worldwide Church of God in his early 20s and was drawn to conspiracy theories about a global Jewish cabal.
īy the time he faced Spassky in 1972, the 30-year-old Fischer had grown paranoid, accusing opponents of trying to poison him. As a teen, he obsessed over chess every waking hour, pouring through the archives at New York City's Marshall Chess Club to replay thousands of old games and develop new strategies. With a reported IQ of 181, Fischer was bored and restless in school, dropping out of high school at 16. Sadly, Fischer's preternatural genius at chess came at a cost to his personal life. But the match that cemented Fischer as America's first - and arguably its only - bona fide chess superstar was his much-hyped trouncing of the Soviet chess master Boris Spassky in 1972 to become the reigning world chess champion.
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