Zerah Colburn (September 1, 1804 – March 2, 1839)[1][2][3] was an American child prodigy of the 19th century who gained fame as a mental calculator.

His father was not sure whether or not he learned the tables from his older brothers and sisters, but he decided to test him further on his mathematical abilities and discovered that there was something special about his son when Zerah correctly multiplied 13 and 97.

Colburn's abilities developed rapidly and he was soon able to solve such problems as the number of seconds in 2,000 years, the product of 12,225 and 1,223, or the square root of 1,449.

He was visited by Harvard College professors and eminent people from all professions, and the newspapers ran numerous articles concerning his powers of computation.

[6] After leaving Boston, his father exhibited Zerah for money throughout the middle and part of the southern states and, in January 1812, sailed with him for England.

Here Zerah was placed in the Lycée Napoléon but was soon removed by his father, who at length in 1816 returned to England in deep poverty.

Toward the end of 1825 he connected himself with the Methodist Church and, after nine years of service as an itinerant preacher, settled in Norwich, Vermont, in 1835, where he was soon after appointed professor of languages at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.