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Year: 1710​

Who: Thomas Fuller​

Where: Alexandria, Virginia

What: In the fields of Northern Virginia, a man named Thomas Fuller, often called the "Virginia Calculator," astounded everyone who encountered his mathematical brilliance. Born in 1710 along Africa’s Slave Coast, Fuller was enslaved and brought to Colonial America at the age of 14. Despite being denied formal education and labeled "illiterate" because he could not read or write English, Fuller displayed an extraordinary ability to solve complex mathematical problems entirely in his head, a skill he likely honed as a child in Africa, where traditions of mental arithmetic and mathematical games were common.

 

Working on the 232-acre plantation of Presley and Elizabeth Cox near Alexandria, Fuller’s talent became indispensable. His owners frequently relied on his mental calculations to manage the farm, from measuring land to estimating yields. Fuller’s reputation for astonishing feats of arithmetic spread, and in 1780, a group of businessmen traveled to meet him, eager to test his abilities. They posed questions of increasing complexity: How many seconds are in a year and a half? Fuller answered correctly: 47,304,000. When asked how many seconds a man aged 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours had lived, he quickly calculated 2,210,500,800, even correcting an observer’s error by accounting for leap years.
 
 
Fuller’s abilities went far beyond curiosity; they challenged the prevailing assumptions of racial inferiority. His mastery of mathematics was later submitted to the Abolitionist Society of Pennsylvania as evidence of the intellectual potential of enslaved Africans. Fuller’s death in 1790 inspired tributes celebrating his genius, with one Boston newspaper declaring that even Isaac Newton would have been honored to call Fuller “a Brother in Science.”

Sources:

Journal Articles:

  • Fauvel, J., & Gerdes, P. (1990). African slave and calculating prodigy: Bicentenary of the death of Thomas Fuller. Historia Mathematica, 17(2), 141-151.

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Johns Hopkins University
2800 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

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