Little Man Tate is a 1991 American drama film directed by Jodie Foster (in her directorial debut) from a screenplay written by Scott Frank.

The film stars Adam Hann-Byrd as Fred Tate, a seven-year-old child prodigy who struggles to self-actualize in social and psychological settings that largely fail to accommodate his intelligence.

Dede Tate is a young working-class woman of average intelligence and strong instincts, raising her seven-year-old son, Fred, alone.

Fred's reading and mathematics abilities are remarkable, and he plays the piano "at competition level", but his intellect has isolated him from his public school classmates.

Fred's abilities come to the attention of Jane Grierson, a former music prodigy and now a psychologist running a school for gifted children.

Fred joins other brilliant young people, and participates in Jane's Odyssey of the Mind event for part of the spring.

There he meets one of his heroes, who is one of Jane's prized pupils, the brilliant but slightly bizarre "Mathemagician" Damon Wells, a whiz at math who wears a black cape wherever he goes.

Fred is later enrolled at a university, where he studies quantum physics while his mother, aunt and cousins travel to Florida for the summer.

Dede tunes into the program from Florida and reacts immediately to Fred’s visual appearance, remarking to herself, “you look like hell, kid.” On the air, Fred claims his mother is dead, and recites a childish poem (a word-for-word repetition of a poem by Matt Montini, one of his former grade school classmates) before taking off his microphone and walking out of the studio.