The Economic Times

By 14, he had taught himself multiple languages and later explained how humans see colour. But his genius mind helped unlock ancient Egypt's lost code

Thomas Young was a remarkable 18th-century polymath who knew several languages by the age of 14 and later made important contributions to science, colour vision and medicine. He also played a key early role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs through his study of the Rosetta Stone, identifying links between hieroglyphs and sounds in the name Ptolemy before Jean-Franois Champollion took the breakthrough further.