Claude Clairaut
French Mathematician Alexis Clairaut and his wife Marjorie immigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania having their only child, Claude, in 1986. Claude was quickly recognized as a child prodigy and, at the behest of his father, he began teaching himself mathematics at age six. He had mastered multivariate calculus by the beginning of his 5th grade year and decided to more deeply examine Euclid’s Geometry. By this time it had become abundantly clear to Claude’s parents that he needed a greater challenge. At 13 he gained admission to The University of Pennsylvania as an Undergraduate double major in Structural Engineering and Mathematics. According to his parents, around halfway through his college sophomore year he began to seem more withdrawn than before and that when approached about his studies he would speak only negatively. Uncharacteristically, he spent the full four years at The University of Pennsylvania, receiving his Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy at the age of 17. He then went on a two year hiatus during which he disappeared from not only from education but also from his family’s home. Little is known about his time as a runaway other than that he had developed greatly radicalized philosophical views as evidenced by a series of papers he wrote on social structures and fatalism. Clairaut himself refuses to speak about this time not only to the public but also to his relatives and friends as well as the police that questioned him upon his return. Shortly after his sudden reappearance he applied to The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management where he pursued a Masters degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering and an Operations Management MBA under the Leaders for Global Operations Program. Claude, however, never finished graduate school and dropped out at age 20. No one has heard from him since the summer of 2006 and he is assumed to have either died or gone into hiding. Attached is the last known picture of Clairaut.
