Then Again: A Vermont prodigy wows the world

Zerah Colburn, born in 1804 in Cabot, stunned academic audiences in America and Europe with his mathematical abilities. Image courtesy of Vermont Historical Society
(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
If anyone was ever born with a special gift, it was Zerah Colburn.
Little about the boy, however, signaled genius in his earliest years. He’d had a smidgeon of education – six weeks at a neighborhood school in his hometown of Cabot; about wh