Teiji Takagi was born in a rural area of Gifu Prefecture in
central Japan. His father was an accountant on a farm in this
mountainous region and Teiji was brought up on the farm on which
his father worked. His mother was a devoted Buddhist and she
took Teiji, when he was a young child, with her when she went to
the temple. Teiji soon showed himself to be a childhood prodigy
by quickly learning to recite the prayers. He attended primary
school in Kazuya Village before going to middle school in Gifu
entering this second stage of his education in 1886. At that
time there were no mathematics texts written in Japanese so the
pupils studying mathematics had to use English texts. Takagi
studied Algebra for beginners by Todhunter and Geometry by
Wilson. In 1891 Takagi began the third stage of his schooling
which he took at the Third High School in Kyoto. There were, at
that time, eight academies and the brightest pupils went to the
one corresponding to the area in which they lived in order to
prepare for a university