When I was a kid I knew a lot of other kids in some sort of "advanced math" track. I was going to math camps, attending the international math olympiad, that sort of thing, so I met a lot of others in a similar situation. One kid was enrolled in college at 13, and some others were in a similar situation. Whereas another cohort of kids basically just cruised through or skipped their high school math classes, learned advanced math quasi-independently in parallel, and stayed socially integrated with their classmates.
I don't know so much about electrical engineering, which is the subject in this article. But for mathematics, I don't think it's a great idea to advance to college super early.
One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. The people who went, for example, to Ohio State University while they were young, and took their undergrad math classes, generally didn't describe them as very intellectually interesting.
You also just miss the social interactions of having a peer group near your own age. But I think those are more apparent to people. The problem is that you think you're exchanging some social interaction for a great intellectual experience, and then you don't even really get a great intellectual experience.
My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam. In my experience, teachers who are hesitant to break the rules of the system are more willing to believe the "proof" of an AP exam, and a smart kid can ace an AP exam in a subject they know nothing about with a little bit of cramming.
It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school.
For math specifically, you can usually just start taking graduate math courses during your freshman year at university. That way, you get the intellectual stimulation of grad school, but the social stimulation of an undergrad program. And if you change your mind and decide you want a career in something other than mathematics, you have plenty of time.
> One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math.
That wasn't my experience. (I went to a top liberal arts college - it didn't give minors, but I took enough math courses that it would've been a minor at other schools.)
In my experience, post-calculus college-level math is qualitatively different from high-school math in focusing on proofs and abstractions over problem-solving, techniques & algorithms. I had an intuitive sense for high-school math. College math kicked my ass, because I was asked to prove everything rigorously, and the proofs just kept coming, dozens of them per homework assignment. That required a very different way of thinking than high-school math did: you needed to remember this large body of theorems and combine them in creative ways to derive new proofs, you couldn't just memorize recipes and techniques that will get you the answer.
I found that physics was more like the continuation of high-school math, except that then your courses had all this lab work and experiment design and fundamental physical principles. One of my friends (a math/physics double major) described it like this: "In physics vectors are objects that live in a vector space, while in math a vector space is a set of axioms from which the concept of a vector and rules for manipulating them naturally fall out."
Edit: hmm, just looked at the username. I know you, and I also know you're better at math than I am. I'm curious just what kind of math you did in high school and what you did in college where the college math was no harder than high school. Either your high school had some really great math courses or your college had some pretty shitty ones. Maybe it's just where we went to school.
Well, I should be more specific. I think once you get into the sort of number theory where you prove things about modular arithmetic, and the sort of analysis where you are talking about abstract spaces rather than n dimensions of real numbers, those courses are notably different from high school courses, and all the focus on proofs is intellectually stimulating to advanced kids.
The courses which are typically boring for advanced kids are calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability, statistics, combinatorics. Most of an undergrad math degree usually falls into this bucket but it really varies by university.
Also, there’s a big difference between colleges. Not because of the curriculum as much as the other students who will set the pace of the class. Often the same kid who could attend Ohio State at 14 could also attend Princeton at 18, and that makes a difference even if the course titles are the same.
>The courses which are typically boring for advanced kids are calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, probability, statistics, combinatorics. Most of an undergrad math degree usually falls into this bucket but it really varies by university.
That's just not true. That's the freshman/sophomore curriculum. And there are big differences between the diff eq, stats & linear algebra course which are which are 'proof' vs. those which are 'practical'.
Ah, I'd agree with that. Calculus/probability/statistics/combinatorics were usually freshman courses at Amherst, and you could often place out of them with APs. Linear algebra was taught proof-based; it and DiffEq were usually sophomore-level courses. The rest of the major was all proof-based.
I think once you get into the sort of number theory where you prove things about modular arithmetic
That’s one small part of the intro algebra course at my university, which all math and CS students take in the fall of first year. The first year calculus courses are considerably proof-based as well, and lots of first years end up failing despite being a high 90s student at their high school.
A more typical high school student who got 80s in their sleeves and calculus courses would fail everything and be asked to withdraw.
I’m not sure how else you’d describe a vector than something that lives in a vector space. The approach of a mathematician might be different but I do believe the idea of scaling and adding things (and then stuff like inner products) is a lot more important than axioms. And at least to me the rules for manipulating them fall out after a huge amount of technical work and details.
How would taking the AP exam in high school be appropriate in this case? That would be the equivalent of taking an AP exam in math 5 years after graduating EE in college.
People are going to have different opinions on whether or not it's worth a 13 year sentence of boredom in order to socialize with age peers, but I really question whether the default high school experience is, for most people, a good thing. Activities like sports and music seem like a vastly better return on effort for advanced kids, with more positive values in the milieu than the typical high school popularity contest.
Ultimately, the world is defined by a vast diversity in ages, backgrounds, and capabilities. If you want to do something in that world, and you're really young, you'll first have to get used to being the youngest person in the room.
Throw all of this argument out the window if the student actually enjoys school, of course.
Taking the AP exam in high school is just a tactic. A situation like:
Student: Man I don't want to take this boring mandatory calculus class.
Teacher: You have to.
Student: But I already know all this stuff!
Teacher: Mmmmm, well that's just like your opinion, man.
Student: What if I ace the AP exam?
Teacher: OK, then I would believe you.
In my experience it's pretty rare for all of high school to be boring. You probably haven't read the particular works they're discussing in English class, you probably haven't read about the particular time period they're discussing in history. And even if you have, there's plenty more you can learn about those things. The most common area to be bored by is math, because you can pick that all up yourself relatively easily.
I suppose it depends on when this all kicks in. In my case, in kindergarden I was tested into 11th grade; in response I was placed into 1st grade. Which was fine, honestly, I spent a lot of time drawing and so forth, but things got really unpleasant and pointless in 7th grade, so I dropped out, and dropped into college. I'm reading a lot of people complaining about the damage to one's social prospects, and surprisingly few calling out what I experienced: school was minimally useful, the social environment was pretty toxic, and in my case, the teacher was tyrannical.
University was so much better! For highly motivated and gifted students, early university can be a great option. It is important to place it on a larger arc of one's own journey of learning, development, and self discovery, however, that must continue for as long as one keeps growing.
As an important aside, girls and boys have approximately equal interests in science math and technology earlier on; for girls this changes pretty severely in middle school and high school. I'm sure there a very large social component to this, parents would do well to inoculate against it by finding alternative environments, and university is certainly one.
> One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math.
I think this is very US-specific. Here in Europe there's definitely a huge difference. You enroll in a pure math-only 5 year degree, and are talking about topology in your third semester already. That might be a specific thing only my analysis prof does, but quite a lot of time is devoted to neatly delineating different levels of structure you're equipping a space with, proving things with as less structure as possible or at least discussing it. You are expected to juggle tricks on a totally different level, which takes a lot more qualitatively different practice than in HS.
When I talk to people who take math classes in the US it's usually not on that level of engagement until the graduate courses. Maybe it depends on their university, in smaller European countries you often have just like one main math program that is then high-intensity.
> It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school.
I can actually agree with you from experience. I was homeschooled from age 13, but my parents didn’t know enough math to home school me in it, so my mother got me into a dual-enrollment program with a community college for math and CS. Overall I did ok, but calculus really threw me for a loop, and I ended up scraping through calc I & II with C’s. I often wonder if I had taken those classes when I was 20 rather than 15 if I would have done any better. My own son took the test (at his math teachers urging) to get into high school algebra while he was still in middle school. He didn’t pass the test, so he had to take plain-old middle-school algebra, and he was actually a little bummed out about it. I told him that when you’re 30, the only thing that really matters (if anything) is where you went to school, which depends a LOT on your test scores… not how old you were when you took the tests. He knew some of the kids who “made the cut”, and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student.
Well, it may be that it goes like this: When you’re 30, where you’ve worked matters. Where you’ve worked depends (a lot) on where you went to school. Where you went to school depends (a lot) on what grades you got. What grades you got depends (somewhat) on how old you were when you took the tests.
Oh yeah. Where you were/who you knew at 20/22 has huge, cascading effects on where you end up at 30, 35 years old. I won't get in to details here but a connection I made working at a coffee shop at 22 can be clearly traced to where I am now at 35. There is a lot of truth in "it's not what you know, it's who you know", particularly on the other side of 30.
>> and they struggled with high school algebra, got B’s and C’s, and one actually dropped out of high school last year while my son is still a straight A student.
I keep hearing this when the school wants to put kids on the advanced track. All it does is give them more work and risk lowering their GPA, which is far more important for admissions. One district allegedly give a 0.5 bump just for taking the bait to make up for that. It's all a game.
That’s definitely not just an allegedly thing, my private high school gave a GPA bonus of 0.5 for honors classes and 1.0 for AP classes to avoid this issue. And I’m certain it wasn’t something unusual or hidden, many other schools must have done it also.
Goodhart’s law and all that - if unadjusted GPA were the sole number to target, it would make way more sense to take the easiest classes possible and never challenge yourself.
These days it seems like a reasonable alternative for a gifted high school stduent to take online math classes. So they can still socialize with their peers but take some advantage of their advanced ability.
I know online classes don't have a great record, but this is probably one of the instances where it makes the most sense. The student is presumably motivated, and if they're not, then it's not a big deal. They're already ahead and can do something else at their regular school.
I was in gifted programs until high school, whereupon I went to a magnet school that had lots of opportunities for advanced math people (you could take calculus freshman year and not run out of math courses). The schools (both private and public) broke up the students into effectively the "fast" math group and the "slow" math group. And very often, there was the "me" group, where I was working at my own pace and quickly burning through the math books.
As you say, students who have that aptitude for math tend to have a sufficient motivation to do the self-study, especially if the material can be presented as some sort of challenge (how fast can you get through this textbook?).
>My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam
I wonder if this sets the teacher up for reprimand though via 'no child left behind' type stuff. I wonder what the repercussions would be if a student complained that someone else was getting more attention (advanced work in this case) which received attention from the administration.
My fiance is a high school math teacher and just a few weeks ago she had a student claim she was bullying him, which got administration involved with a parent-teacher-administrator-student conference. When the student was asked how he bullies her "she makes me stay awake and do my work in class" which got her off and got her an apology from administration but she was legitimately nervous about it prior to the meeting because that's the state of public education now.
Anecdotally, she's doing her best just to get her students capable of doing the assigned math as they will just pop out their phones when she's not looking (or when they think she isn't) and use some app on their phones to tell them the answers (PhotoMath I think) so they aren't even getting the foundations they need to continue to advanced maths. At her current school someone wanting advance placement would be a pretty rare exception. She has multiple students that will write profanities as answers, will draw cartoons as answers, will write things along the lines of "I don't know I want to die" "this doesn't matter" etc the past few years. Seeing the 9 year old in the OP article seems miraculous to us both given the state of things at some schools.
Can we all agree to never use that word? Actual prodigies are measure zero in the general population. Terry Tao is a prodigy. The rest of us are just normal schmucks.
Prodigy suggests that talent comes naturally to and is dismissive of the massive amount of work that goes into preparing for something like the IMO.
As someone who attended the IMO, I can tell you it varies widely. For some people, they screw around a lot, attend math camp but spend a lot of time playing games, dick around doing normal teenager things, get in trouble for stupid teenager things, don't study too hard, and nevertheless do well enough to attend the IMO. And then some people are responsible, study a lot, work hard, keep their heads down, and also attend the IMO.
Talent does come naturally to them. Instead of arguing about labels, it's better to think about talent quantitatively. If the USA's IMO contestants were generally slackers, they'd still be comfortably in the top 100 in their birth year (in the entire country) in the AMC/AIME combined score, just by showing up when the teacher told them to. (Well, back in the early 2000's. Maybe competition is stiffer nowadays.) And the gulf in talent between them and the worst kids in that top 100 list is large.
I didn't end up doing IMO due to weird school situations, but I'd won some prestigious math competitions (two other winners I befriended one year went on to become IMO gold medalists) and was able to solve some IMO problems in middle school on my own. At the time I felt I was just different from others in terms of mathematical ability.
My general feeling now is that talent as perceived by others is mostly a function of hard work. Looking back, the level of persistence I was able to apply to mathematical problems at such an early age without any real supervision was incredible. I was almost entirely self-taught from age 7-10 and without being on a strict curriculum, this included some college level math. I think this was a function of a lot of things that don't have much to do with natural ability.
At least a few IMO gold medalists have younger brothers who are good enough to be involved in math activities in high school but are not remotely close to the same level. They are in fact different in terms of mathematical ability. You would be more aware of the value of natural ability if you had put work in, but then couldn't come close to winning prestigious math competitions.
My own brother was exactly that way (good enough to be one of the best in school and hold his own at an elite university, but not close to good enough for any kind of actual competition) but my understanding is that he was only ever trying, never doing.
There's a huge difference between learning something because some external pressure dictates that you learn it and truly immersing yourself in something and just letting go. Math isn't that exciting for most people, so the vast majority of people never cross over to the latter. So the extremely small percentage of people that are able to cross the chasm and deal with math natively can stand out.
I agree with what you're saying in general. I don't know whether you really quantitatively disagree with me. I think without any deep immersion like you describe, the IMO team members would still have done well enough on the AMC/AIME to qualify for the USAMO. Do you disagree with that? (Again, my difficulty scale is based off the early 2000's.)
I mean, my basis for that estimate is that I know a bunch of people without such immersion who got that far when I was a kid, who were on the regular school education track, didn't self-educate outside that, and didn't have much external pressure either.
Edit: But I don't mean to imply these people absolutely never thought about math or numbers outside of the classroom, because it's interesting, and they most certainly did, just no traversal through a curriculum, or deep immersion.
Things exist on a spectrum and I don't think we're really on the same page on what it means to be immersed - it's about how your subconscious mind decides to prioritize things, not about any kind of curriculum. I spent a lot of time in my life cleaning and organizing stuff, but I'm not good at it and not getting better at it either. I'm pretty sure this isn't because some lack of natural ability prevents me from being good - for whatever reason, this is just something that I don't find interesting. This is how most people approach math - as a chore to be done and forgotten. Even regular good-at-math people (which most people at elite schools would qualify) that aren't remotely close to competing at the likes of IMO and Putnam are qualitatively different in this regard compared to average students because they are broadly speaking more immersed in their studies. For most people, it's not merely that they don't think about math outside of the classroom - their mind is also too busy thinking about anything but math while doing math.
The flaw with this model is that it doesn't really explain the world, because if you compared most kids who do well on math contests to the average high school honors student, you'd have to argue that their performance in almost every subject besides Band and PhysEd is the result of mental prioritization. Also, observing that an underperformer just didn't mentally prioritize it the same is basically mind-reading; it isn't a refutable observation. We can see the weakness of the argument by using it to explain the effect of age on performance, without finding direct evidence to refute it. But the actual cause is that kids get smarter as they get older. It also fails to explain why kids rank so differently at contests like 24, versus later contests that test a mostly different sort of ability. That kids who do well on math contests like thinking about math can't be taken as a factor in more than a banal sense.
And imagine trying to make the same argument for basketball. Kids with low field goal percentages just don't want it enough?
I'm not sure if your advice is for kids good at math who want to eventually do something else, or kids that actually want to be mathematicians? I always thought being a mathematician was something special in that there is ample historical evidence of very young prodigies in that field who made big contributions.
Or are you saying top tier schools for math are so much better, that aspiring mathematicians should wait if at all possible to go to a top tier school? What if he's admitted at a top tier school at 9?
I was a pretty mediocre student in high school (as in, I didn’t get into Duke, people like you would consider me a failure etc), what would you say was the biggest difference between the precocious crowd you describe and everyone else? Do you think it’d just inherent?
I did community college in high school so I’d say it’s better to eliminate the “boring” general ed classes first but that’s just my experience.
The top-tier schools usually don't accept super-young students, though. What usually happens is, a second-tier school will accept a super-young student because they see no downside. The top-tier schools will tell you, just wait and apply again when you are older.
I don't know specifically about the Eindhoven University of Technology but it seems like roughly the 100th best school in Europe, which in the US would be like going to Saint Louis University. A fine school I'm sure, but if you can graduate there when you're 9 then maybe you should just instead go to Harvard when you're 18.
Lots of people do the equivalent of this, early college classes and then they go to a top tier school for undergrad. I think Reid Barton did this.
There are caveats, I know someone who finished the CS curriculum in high school, when he got to Berkeley the only credits he had left for his CS degree were non-CS, which bored him, so he just dropped out and started a startup. Seems fine now, as far as that goes, aside from the exodus from the bay area that the housing situation has forced on many of us...
As someone who went to college early (some community college classes at 14, then university at 16), and was partially homeschooled (freshman-junior year), I wouldn't recommend this.
Socializing is huge. I really cannot emphasize enough how important it is, especially for younger kids. If you're really smart or gifted in a subject, there are multiple other avenues to take that still let you hang out with peers around your age.
Sports or clubs (Scouts, etc) are a better way to hang around with peer kids than school classes, IMO.
I transitioned from homeschool to public school at one point during my childhood and I think I was actually much more socialized in homeschool where I was in sports, Scouts, intentional play dates, etc. that my parents were doing to avoid the socialization problem. Whereas once you’re put in public school it’s simply assumed you will be somehow “socialized” (in reality socialization in school often takes the form of bullying, especially if you’re clearly different from peers in some way like intelligence, or you can end up just not having friends)
This seems like a very personal take. Most kids I knew in school were also involved with sports and clubs, it wasn't just assumed they'd get enough socialization in school. I also doubt that socialization "often" takes the form of bullying, and while there's no doubt that bullying is a problem, it's certainly not the primary experience most people have in school.
Yes, it is a personal take based on my own experience, however, when considering the case of a 9 year old who is able to graduate from a college education, that seems a pretty unique case and maybe their situation should also be demanding of a personal/unique path rather than simply following the factory schooling approach designed for the average student on the basis of “socialization”.
Parents should definitely take socialization into account for such a student, but I don’t think putting them into a standard school academic track is the only way to achieve such socialization.
but that's the point. if we don't assume that school provides enough socialization, then why bother with it. comparing the parent comments experience with my own and what my kids in school are now going through, it seems that this would be preferable over traditional schooling.
At the same a lot of the kind of socialization you get forced to do at school is irrelevant in life. The minimum level of decency at an average workplace is much higher than at an average school and bullying much less common and you get to avoid most of the socially complicated situations school 'trains' you for.
Obviously there are a lot of benefits from socializing at school but there's really a lot you can do without. It would be much more beneficial to get kids to socialize in an environment where beating someone up actually ends up in the court.
So tired of people perpetuating this "kids need to go to school to become socialized" myth. Socialization is about being with people who have similar interests and you enjoy being around. This does not require a school setting.
Not sure how easy it is for children to organically socialize outside of a school setting, especially in today’s digital age where socializing is becoming an even rarer occasion as it is, and socializing outside of school almost necessitates very intentional effort on multiple parties.
Not saying it’s not possible, but a school setting is definitely one very easy organic path to socializing children.
I would like to quote Aaron Swartz here on the subject of unschooling:
But won't my child become a unsocial hermit?!
Interestingly, I've heard people dislike unschooling not because they are afraid that their children will not learn anything, but because they are afraid they will not develop "healthy social relationships with their peers". Nothing could be farther from the truth.
First, school is not a place to develop social relationships. In fact, it seems designed to stifle them. There is hardly little time for socialization provided, and it is discouraged for the majority of the school day. Any student who does develop a true relationship with someone does it outside of school: at a local meeting place (like a park or mall); when going over to a friend's house; or after school. An unschooler can still do all of these things.
Second, who decided that meaningful relationships could only be had with other people who happen to be in roughly the same physical area at roughly the same age? If anything, this is a severely restrained peer group. I have developed my most meaningful relationships online. None of them live within driving distance. None of them are about my own age. Even among those who I would not count as "friends", I have met many people online who have simply commented on my work or are interested by what I do. Through the Internet, I've developed a strong social network -- something I could never do if I had to keep my choice of peers within school grounds.
My kids are homeschooled and we consistently receive unsolicited feedback from other adults that they rarely encounter children these days who can have a conversation. I know that’s not true as I see plenty of conventionally schooled kids possess the same skillset. In my view, all this means is that the one nearly universal defense of conventional brick and mortar school - “the socialization” - is totally bogus. I find it interesting the most parents we met raise this defense rather than suggest superior learning environments or something more related to - you know - school. But these days we hear less and less the socialization argument and more the lament- ie Parents wishing they had the time and/or skills to homeschool. And I really do not wish this to seem judgmental but what do they think they already are doing with all the activities and extra learning they are providing their kids? It would seem to me many parents already are homeschooling they just don’t see it as such...
I think socialization is a bit broader than 'spending time with peers'. School is a microcosm of society - full of institutional logic, dysfunction, and perverse incentives. It's a perfect training-ground for teaching people how real organizations work. If you are socialized in well-functioning groups with shared interests and common purpose, you miss out on all the hairy stuff - and you can end up expecting a lot more from the institutions you encounter as an adult than they'll actually deliver.
I started college at 16 and skipped my final year of highschool.
Totally helped me socialize - first year uni students cared less about who I hung out with, and more about who I was. I was able to reset and engage with people in the way I wanted to. I was also able to accelerate my pathway to meeting attractive and mature young women, since I went to an all boys high school.
I feel like I did the opposite.. not that I’m a genius or anything, but it was kinda hard to start uni, since I had spent way much time calibrating my behavior to be accepted by my high school peers (or the equivalent, this is in Europe)
Still trying to shake of the horrible socialization that is the result of accepting that the people who are left behind by the education system act out in violent ways.
I get a lot of super smart roboteers on my robotics teams. They get a chance to socialize with others. Because we compete they get a chance to meet other teams roboteers. So there is lots of ways to meet others.
There are posts about home school students, some of the teams meet at the local library (not just books!) and that also helps
I'm not sure anything is stopping him from going back to normal school to socialize while studying the non-STEM subjects that everyone needs to do anyway? He could hang out with friends while doing that.
I was one of these children. In hindsight, I think it damages your development in many ways to the detriment of long-term outcomes. The unfortunate environment and instability of my childhood living situation, which ultimately derailed the "child prodigy" track, may have put me in a better position to actualize my abilities despite the obvious negatives at the time. I knew a couple other kids like me that stayed on that track, none had great outcomes.
The intense focus on academic learning does very little to prepare you for being a productive human out in the real world, which is tacitly a part of the environment normal kids grow up in. That many of these kids are dropped into the real world even earlier than their age peers due to accelerated schooling just compounds this.
One the upside, one elementary school that had no idea how to teach me sat me in front of a computer and left me to my own devices. So I taught myself to program.
I was actually one of those incredibly young kids to finish school, and this right here scares me. Nothing good came from the rush other than some local publicity for a few months. I think it crippled my chances long term social skills, and still going to therapy to try and catch up in any non-academic sense.
Like anything else, social skills just takes practice. A lot of practice. I've read probably over a hundred books on self-help, sales, influence, social skills of all sorts. Ultimately the conclusion is that meeting people and socializing can be scary, but, it's an irrational fear it gets better and easier with practice. It's less about being right or saying the right thing all the time, and more about having a quick reaction to what to say and connect with people on an emotional level. It is all about practice. If you work at a company that has a sales team and you ever wonder how they're so good at being witty, funny, or being liked, just remember that it took them a lot of practice. They're probably on the phone all day long, and I can guarantee you that for most of them it was really hard at first too. Eventually you just get better with people because your brain will adapt, so just put yourself out there.
I think you're grossly underestimating the nuances of human interaction that are developed from ages 2-10. I can tell you first hand watching a friends kid who was home schooled trying to interact with his public school peers that they are like a fish out of water. To suggest as an adult you just need "dive in" to figure out social cue's is... unfairly simplified.
Can you potentially figure it out over a long period of time if you happen to hook up with some folks that are very understanding and tolerant of "odd" behavior? Sure... but you're talking years and years and years of interaction to recoup those lost social skills.
Yes, literally years of practice that Laurent is completely missing out on. Even with all those years of practice, lots of people come out of school unable to socialize properly.
I'm not on quite the same level, but I was definitely quick enough to skip a few grades. Thankfully my parent's didn't let me - I wanted to at the time, but to be honest, the importance of social wellness is drastically understated by academic community.
Humans are animals, and social animals at that. If we don't give our brains social release, we're going to struggle.
I suppose that the tradeoff here is that the child is bored in class right? Curious how you handled the lack of academic challenge given that you were the one who wanted to proactively move up (vs Parents wanting to move their kid up)
Anecdote: I took responsibility for my own education.
And by that I mean quite literally I had the epiphany that I was ahead of my peers/some teachers when I entered high school (i remember it was the first time I realised they were ranking us and that we were supposed to be competing for grades... hadn't received any/paid attention to them until then), and so made a vow (child's/ adolescent minds are funny like that) that i would do whatever it takes to learn the truth about things irrespective of this social system/mandate to keep going to school.
Its worked out for me in the long run, but that's partly because I'm deeply interested in the social sciences and so was spending so much time thinking about how these strange humans act and what I can do to learn from their behaviour (still do and always will feel like an alien/man trapped in an asylum though).
At the time though, it resulted in all kinds of social problems. I just stopped doing some assignments + homework. I failed math, then simultaneously topped the grade on the national standardised test they made us take, resulting in a meeting with the school/my parents. I called the math teacher stupid, thinking the adults would listen/care to listen to my words. I was accused of plagiarism in one of my English classes and received a failing grade for that until another meeting: the evidence? Just a general feeling that it was 'too good for someone like me, so someone else must have written it'. I got on fine enough with my peers, it was largely the irrational adult world I couldn't understand at the time.
They tried putting me in gifted programs occasionally, but I viewed (accurately imo) that the children in them were social climbers rather than gifted/smart, so I didn't get along with the other kids in them at all (not as in hostile, as in I just found them incredibly boring people and the entire experience incredibly boring).
In summary, I continued to have social problems and continued this pattern of non attendance, non completion, failure, and randomly top out some metric.
I made it to university where I was promised it would be more intellectual: it wasn't, and my perception there was that it was even more authoritarian/social and about parroting back what the lecturers wanted to hear and doing the admin dance rather than actual intellectual inquiry. I had some good lecturers, but some of the were on another planet of dumb (mainly due to the specialisation heirachy of the university system: even today the idea that you could have knowledge/expertise from more than one field hurts brains). I eventually graduated with a similar pattern of grades, but stopped attending any lectures by the end of it and regularly handed in my assignments late (due, fundamentally, to the mental drudgery of doing them and the absolute inanity of the questions/formats).
My actual goal was a success though: I spent huge amounts of my spare time reading/ studying/discussing things of my own volition, and all I can say is thank GOD I was born just in time for the internet to arrive as I hit adolescence or I think that would have been the end of me. I consider myself learned, mature and happy now. I have a family, and, currently, a job where people listen to me (and outside of silicon valley, a wage considered high, plus I live exactly where I want with access to learning materials still).
It left me deeply distrustful of formal education systems and social institutions (I think justifiably/accurately).
Someone without my ability to learn/observe/pick up on social cues would have been chewed up and spat out though once they reached the real world assuming dad isn't giving them a job, and I would say it's been far from smooth sailing even for me (80% of my life is still pretending I'm 'dumber' than I really am, even though I'm now partly looked up to as an authority in my line of work, and smiling/trying to get along with everyone and the social system).
Protip for those following after: 80% of human social interaction is comprised of recognising who has authority/status, smiling, and avoiding open conflict :p everything also makes a lot more sense when you realise truth doesn't rate as an ongoing concern in most human's lives (but being viewed as 'socially correct' is extremely important).
Yep, I was the same way. The school and my parents wouldn't let me, even though I easily could have skipped a few grades. Likewise, I had a chance to go to an academy in my state that basically lets you start college early. You go live on campus, take college classes with other juniors and seniors, etc. I have to say it was just as well that I didn't do that either. I certainly experienced an outgrowth of social experience those last two years, and became, in my own words, a lot more "normal." And it really took some good friends it had taken me a few years to make and a teacher to push me, something I would've never developed if I had skipped through grades.
I wasn't incredibly young, but I had completed a two-year degree by the time I was 16. It hasn't benefited me in any way - if anything, it might have hurt me a bit since my grades might have been (might...) a bit higher if I'd just gone to high school and started college at 18 like everybody else.
I'm not even that smart—tested into gifted programs by the skin of my teeth—and I'm just about certain I could have completed a 2-year degree in some mid-difficulty subject area by no later than 18—maybe as young as 16—if I'd found a way to get my GED over a Summer or something else that'd mark me as "college ready", applied, and been accepted to a community college.
I didn't try to do it because I didn't understand the relative difficulty of high school and (your average non-elite) college, at the time, though. High school eats so much time that college ended up feeling much easier, and the course work for subject areas outside the harder end of STEM wasn't a bit tougher than that of high school (the dividing line is essentially "is any of the math required more difficult than Calc 1?"). I wasn't expecting the first couple years of a 4-year degree to often fail to go past material we'd covered in 8th grade (looking at you, Psych. 101 requirement). I just expected it to be much harder than it actually was, since I gathered that's how it's supposed to be.
Same, entered college at 14. My social skills were wack, was terrible at public speaking, very socially awkward. Was in my room playing Dota 2 for the first 2 years. I'm just finished up at 19 and I feel more mature and understand why so many universities didn't want to accept me at my age.
However, I think it all worked out, as long as parents make provisions for social adjustment things can work out okay. I don't know about 9 though, seems tough, i literally could not imagine it because college was a lot more than just studying. Especially since I was in a cognitive science not like a hard STEM, lots of social interaction and open ended questions.
I went to university at 16. It was like a wonderful playground, so many subjects and areas and it was a great time.
I ended up liking it so much, I spent 9 years there drifting to 300+ credits :-b
I cannot imagine going at 14. That must have been pretty weird. At 16 I was fine and the biggest issue was the dating and (underage) drinking mismatch.
For me going at 16 was an incredible relief. I was incredibly, incredibly bored and unchallenged in school until that point. I wish there wasn't such a stigma about it because I imagine there are lots of other people who had the same level of terrible frustration.
I supported my educational habits working as a network and system administrator. That route is now screwed by universities outsourcing these tasks.
There's a HN posting in why there is such a dearth of technical support hires in the modern era and it starts with killing the pipeline and ends with eviscerating the entire career in the outsourcing binge of the early 2000s...
From the video and article it doesn't seem like the kid is being rushed. The parents said that they're just "going with the flow" and "it's just who he is". It really seems like they're trying to do what's best for the kid and give him a balanced life. Maybe I'm just an optimist.
I read TFA, I know he's planning on grad school, but it's funny to imagine him taking a break and going into the workforce 9 years later at 18 years old:
<Company A>
Hiring manager: checks resume This guy graduated back in 2019 and hasn't had a job since? Nope, no way. I'm not interested. Probably some lazy kid again.
<Company B>
Interviewer: So I saw you graduated in 2019? What jobs have you had since then? Any personal projects?
At the age of 9 with a bachelor's, I can totally see taking this kid on as an intern where we work. We can't exactly pay him, but I'll cut a check to his parents.
I started college at 9. Didn't actually graduate at the time, basically started doing computer projects on my own, then went back to school at 22 in the PhD program at Berkeley. I haven't made a huge deal about this, but am more open to talking about it now, especially if the experience helps other people. Feel free to AMA.
Thanks for offering the AMA (as well as the work on druid).
A few questions, and feel free to ignore, tangent, etc. any as you see fit:
1.) It seems you had a good educational upbringing from your parents. What did they do to encourage and promote your ability to learn and understand?
2.) What things do you think children in your situation need to be made aware of–whether it's to understand life, childhood, society, or themself–that may be overlooked?
I'll leave it at that for now. I ask because as I plan for parenthood, I want to make sure I can help my child understand the world better, but also be socially well adapted for their peers, as well as feel good about their life as they understand who they are in the world.
My parents worked pretty relentlessly to make opportunities for me. My mom was a professional librarian (still works a couple days a week), so we always had tons of books around. My dad made sure there were computers around - we built our first 8-bit kit when I was 6. Also he reached out to a lot of people who could be resources, for example when Niklaus Wirth gave a talk on Oberon at a University Maryland, he drove me out to see that.
I think (2) is a good question, but a huge one, I'm not sure what to say within a HN comment. I know it's a cliche, but certainly that being smart isn't everything, there's a lot more to life. The game-like recognition of academic credentials and so on is not as meaningful in the real world as it seems "in the bubble."
That said, what I think is a common thread of prodigies is a hunger and thirst for knowledge, to learn things. I carry that with me today, and think it's something to be nourished.
Did I say AMA above? I should have probably qualified that...
But I'll say this. I was very socially awkward as a kid and teenager. I dated some as an older teenager, but didn't feel quite comfortable until I got to grad school (at 22). Then I fell in with a peer group, got a really good friend group (who I still keep in touch with), dated and got married, had two kids, now divorced. So it's definitely part of my story, but my experience now is probably not all that different than most of my friends.
Since you got to interact with college students as a really young kid through being peers with them (I assume), did you also got to interact with the same group many years later when you went back and do you found the interactions to be similar?
I know that this kid was raised really isolated from kids around the same age, did you also have this and how do look back at this?
Yes, and I would say my interactions around academic topics were pretty similar. I really loved hanging around University computer labs as a kid and young teenager, and that was no different at all when I got to Berkeley.
And yes, I was pretty isolated from other kids. Part of that story is that I grew up in a very rural, mountainous area. Looking back, I wish I had had more of a peer group. I wanted to go to the Johns Hopkins gifted program, but I think my parents were reluctant to let their little boy go into the big bad world. I regret they didn't.
Quite a few. Both the Berkeley grad program and working at Google will put you in touch with a fair number of gifted people, plus a few more through social and family circles.
Regarding my own children, this is complicated and I don't really want to talk about it here, but I'll say that their mom and I made sure to make opportunities available, but put a lot less pressure on them than I had when I was growing up.
The college experience is about a lot more than job training. As I wrote in another response, it's about finding the best way to celebrate and nourish the thirst for learning new things.
I have had a very rewarding and fulfilling career, and am gratified that I'm now able to pursue the things that interest me most: tools for font design, high performance 2D graphics, Rust GUI. A lot of this is connected to the things I was interested in as a teenager.
Short answer, yes. I was accelerated in the local high school, but that didn't work out for a number of reasons. So basically my dad decided I should take classes at the nearby college. It was unusual at the time and place, but he had quite a forceful personality.
My son at the age of 8 got diagnosed high precocity. He was showing the intellectual capacities of a 16 yo.
Everyone was suggesting us to skip two or three classes and keep skipping them.
I refused and kept him in his normal track because he was emotionally a 8 yo kid,who spittle play with other children, who silly things and learn to be social.
I let him read a lot, he was interested in science so we were discussing these subjects a lot etc.
He is now 16, happy, doing silly things with his peers and otherwise attending the 3rd high school in the country (being average+ there). I am everyday so happy with our choice.
I'm from the Netherlands and this story is not entirely true. This kid has been given a highly customized program where he didn't have to complete massive amounts of coursework that normal students have to complete. While I find it nice that a university provides this opportunity at the same time I also find it a largely unfair to other bachelor students that have to go along with the normal long program.
It's a 3 year program that I believe the average student could do in at least half the time if they where give the same freedoms this boy has been given.
As someone who actually got the same degree at the same University as thd kid, I can confirm this is true. The amount of coursework he skipped is relatively high (every group project, some mandatory non-engineering subjects, at least totalling to 45 ECTS on top of my head) and the freedom he got when doing courses is unprecedented: no mandatory attendance and only oral examinations.
A 14 year old girl started the same program around 2006, she did do the full, regular coursework.
It's funny a deleted comment asked if geniuses ever achieve anything. My cousin is supposedly a genius (siblings all have doctorates) yet works in a laundromat.
I saw an article where one genius kid years ago was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said a gameshow host.
Educating a high-IQ child, especially a "profoundly gifted" child (above 145 IQ) is particularly challenging.
They get by with their raw intellect for most of school, and everyone compliments them on how smart they are. But they never learn skills like how to study, how to learn, how to persevere etc.
So once they hit their plateau, which everyone does, they don't know how to get past it and then they give up. A kindergartener that can read like a grade 8 will work off her raw intellect until she gets to grade 8, but then once her abilities max out, she won't have learned how to get past that, and that's where she flames out.
It happens all the time, even to friends of mine in high school. One of my gifted friends did well in high school but unfortunately flamed out in spectacular fashion in freshman year and I haven't heard from her in 30 years, even though we were extremely close and I reached out to her several times over the years.
I'm growing increasingly pessimistic about posts like this which claim to have a nuanced understanding of [child development] but actually rely more on personal feelings, anecdotes, and pseudoscience.
A smart girl who grows up in a school where everyone's getting pregnant at 14 might end up pregnant at 14. A smart kid who grows up in Flint might have to deal with the same lead poisoning as everyone else, with potentially varying symptoms. A smart kid whose parents are depressed in its adolescence might be depressed.
There are many potential causes of burnout and it's extremely unhelpful to assume that we know what's happening to these kids based on "I know a guy who knows a guy". What you're essentially doing is framing a kid's failures as a moral issue of perseverance and study skills when it might be, but it also might not be.
Imagine being naturally competent but having a mental illness that invites the public to inject their own personal biases.
No. My child and my wife scored as Profoundly gifted, going to a gifted school and I myself went through gifted schools as well. I'm very familiar with this.
My IQ was only a few points lower than 145, when tested in middle school. I was praised and never pushed hard all the way to the Ivy League, where my ass was handed to me by a couple thousand other kids who had only gotten there through hard work and perserverence.
Interestingly, this is one of the inspirations for Study Swami. I saw a lot of this- and even with less gifted students but who still didn't know how to live up to their "potential."
She ghosted me back in the early 90s after she flamed out of college. We were BFF in high school before BFF was a term, we were prom dates, etc. I stopped seeing her in class, and I reached out to her often in the first few years, but heard from friends that she could handle college. I've reached out a few times over the few couple of decades but her lack of response means she doesn't want to talk to me, so I respect it.
There are two traits that most predict performance in life: IQ and conscientiousness. "Genius", as most people refer to the word, essentially means high IQ. But IQ has no correlation whatsoever to conscientiousness, so you can be someone with extremely high IQ but extremely low conscientiousness. If you have low conscientiousness you're going to be someone who isn't particularly disciplined, hard-working, organized, reliable, etc. So you can get these situations where there are geniuses who achieve nothing because they lack conscientiousness. Most people who end up achieving a lot tend to be high in both traits.
And of course, conscientiousness isn't fixed. You can improve it through various means. Although if you're extremely low in it in my view you're likely not going to be able to improve such that you can become the most conscientious person out of 100, for instance.
My brother is a genius and also a violin prodigy. He works as a programmer, but has zero ambition. He does his work, goes home, and plays video games. He has done this for 40 years. He could have been one of the best violinists in history, or made an impact in medical research, or any other number of things.
When we talked about it in the past, his reasoning is: "life is short, I'm going to have all the fun I can before I die."
I'm kind of surprised that someone who is a genius would be not be bored after 40 years of playing video games. He must have a peculiar personality on top of that.
"Playing videogames" isn't enjoying your life "in full", especially if you're smart and could do things that are really meaningful instead.
I'm pretty sure he knows this deep down inside, but that "have fun, don't give a fuck"-attitude is just a too convenient rationalization for being a lazy coward.
> "Playing videogames" isn't enjoying your life "in full", especially if you're smart and could do things that are really meaningful instead.
Why is "playing videogames" considered not meaningful? I have a group of friends that I have played video games with for over 10 years. We have shared a number of life ups and downs together and have met up in person numerous times. I would argue that we all bonded over videogames and it was the door that opened a broader friendship among each of us. Oh yeah, to be a bit a dick, we all make over 200 on average, with one way north of that. Every one of us is well-adjusted and now married.
That's really what you wanted to measure, right? How "successful" one is. Stereotyping isn't helpful. It blinds you to things that exist as they are.
Of all the things you talked about here, the "videogame" part is obviously not the meaningful one. It could've been any other activity that lets you socialize. Sure, some people may socialize through videogames, but the guy in the example likely doesn't. Even if he does, socializing itself isn't enough.
> Grow up.
Part of growing up is recognizing that you don't get to set your own values. You're not biologically capable of ignoring how other specimens judge you and how you measure up against them. Even if you don't believe in these "natural values", your own nature will be telling you that you're too maladapted to be part of the future. It'll make you wither and die, to make room for everyone else. That's not a happy ending.
Being the best violinist isn't meaningful to me. If he pursued that goal then maybe he would actually reduce his meaningfulness from the perspective of someone else.
It sounds to me like you missed a pretty big memo. There is no such thing as meaning in life. Meaning is just a human created construct to achieve certain goals, primarily ones that we ourselves consider important to us. Because every human mind operates independently no global meaning can exist. The upside is that there is no central god like entity that arbitrarily defines meaning and you can do whatever you want (within your own cognitive framework). What you are doing is to simply impose your own selfish values onto other people.
Meaning may well be subjective to some degree, across individuals of the species. However, to say that there is "no such thing as meaning in life" is nihilism. That may well be true at a cosmic scale, but at an individual scale it's just a rationalization that absolves you of any responsibility to live up to your potential.
You'll be a loser that has wasted a life, and everyone recognizes that, even though they'll never dare tell you. You will most likely recognize it yourself at some point, or maybe your cognitive dissonance will protect you, but I wouldn't count on it.
Indeed, people often exaggerate the abilities of smart people so much so that their achievements seem unreachable, then when they hear them complain they think 'how ungrateful of them'.
does he still play the violin for fun? Being able to play at all is rare enough that that alone is worthwhile if it entertains him&his family. Nobody needs to be Nobel prizewinner or anything, and plenty of people become Nobel prizewinners that you'd never have thought anything of when they were < 18.
I wonder if it's like the gene for sickle cell. Two copies of it are bad (sickle cell anemia), but one copy of the gene can protect against malaria. A bit of genius can be incredibly helpful, but too much can make it difficult to relate to other people.
People rarely consider the fact that just because someone is born to be a genius doesn't mean that they'll want to grow up to be an academic.
I was born reasonably smart-ish. Did okay in school, have a good job writing code because I have an aptitude for it. But if I had a big dream, it would be in entertainment.
You may find it interesting that in Finland academics doesn't start until age 7. They emphasize play / arts in preschool and by age 15 outperform most countries. What has this child lost by encouraging academic pursuits at such a young age? Will they ever recover, and what was at risk by having them wait a few years?
Would this be more common if more parents were aware it was a possibility? At this risk of sounding arrogant, I'm fairly certain I could have kept up with at least the average college student by the time I was 12 or 13.
Can you even enroll in university without a high school diploma? I certainly might have if I had heard more stories like this.
Devil's advocate: What about the developmental and psychological damage inflicted by some (Not all) school environments?
I skipped a couple of grades, and started university at 16. By far the worst time that I had, in my psychological development, was in middle school, when I was among same-age peers. Children can be incredibly cruel to eachother.
>Devil's advocate: What about the developmental and psychological damage inflicted by some (Not all) school environments?
Since everybody gets that, that's the same as the "developmental and psychological damage inflicted" by society, or life in general.
In other words, a necessary evil. And perhaps not even evil, just something to make people stronger for the real world, which is not all roses and love.
Children might be incredibly cruel to each other, but the stakes are much lower. In adult life adults can be cruel to each other in much higher stakes (cheating on you, taking advantage of you, stealing from you, abusing you, beating you, looking down on you, and tons of other ways). And that doesn't stop in a few years, like school does. Those cruelties can go on till one dies...
Yeah I should hope so. If you spend some time around kids you notice that while there are a lot of average kids, there is no shortage of really bright ones that could totally be learning more than they are learning at a regular school. Mostly we don't kick them up to a higher grade, because it never really works out for the best. Probably because you forget most of the details of what you learn anyway unless it's a basic life skill or part of your career. What you get out of school is social experience and how to learn.
While stipulating that there are exceptions to every rule, I have personal experience with some people who were home schooled and largely shielded from the outside world. Their young adult years have been pretty rough, as they try to learn enough to be safe and then successful with their lives.
Alternatively, if it gets more common, perhaps there would be space for more peer group socialization alongside the academic acceleration. If you teach vector calc to an entire group of 9 year olds, maybe they can develop as normal, as opposed to the potentially damaging solution of teaching it to a group of 18 year olds and one 9 year old.
This is the thought crossing my head. The best version of this is find a way for the young brilliant kids to have time together so they at least have some sort of peer group, instead of always being the weird little kid among college students or the like. Although it could still lead to some issues since ONLY dealing with brilliant people isn't the most real-world experience in the long run.
There really needs to be some method for giving them the chance to excel to their maximum (without unfairly pushing them because we can) while also having a chance to experience more general social settings.
I wish more parents were involved with their children's education, some just expect the government to educate their kids while they just work or stay at home. Some aren't even really aware of charter schools, which some are way better compared to the local public school. Got to be accepted, but at least it doesn't cost like private school since the funds are moved from the local city school to the charter school.
There's a family who sold their house to full time RV, and their dad is a web developer, but him and his wife have already started teaching the kids to read and write even though not even at age for school yet, which they are homeschooling anyways - but kinda forced to if traveling full time. Looks like there's some company that sells you a package with the curriculum. I guess that doesn't work for every family, but I really love to see when parents are more involved, and get a bit jealous. I feel like that gives them a head start.
Then some kids don't even go to preschool. I feel like the education system is one size fits all too. Kinda wish we had more school choices, and then not everyone has the same learning style. I remember seeing on the news once some school started as a experiment to teach via games. Forget what it's called. Some kids who are told they are ADD or ADHD, when really it's the style of educating that's the fault, so the lazy teachers tell their parents to put them on drugs so they are labeled as disabled just to get more funding for the school to pocket.
> Can you even enroll in university without a high school diploma?
What a lot of us did (including myself and apparently a lot of other commenters in this thread) was took advantage of community college dual enrollment programs: if your middle- or high-school teacher approves it, and you can pass an entrance exam, they’ll let you take community college courses for credit part time even without a high school diploma. Well, if you’re home schooled, your “teachers”/parents are probably going to approve it, so as long as you can pass the entrance exam, you can start accumulating college credit as early as you care to.
> I'm fairly certain I could have kept up with at least the average college student
> Can you even enroll in university without a high school diploma? I certainly might have if I had heard more stories like this.
He finished highschool a year earlier (he only did a single year for his bachelor's). And by law you must have a highschool diploma to start uni over here.
What ever happens to these kids? I read these articles once every few years, and then .. Does the beurocracy of academia swallow them whole or is their work no longer interesting once they hit 18? Or do they become average academics?
Ted Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled in Harvard at 16 and graduated in 3 years. He completed his post-grad at Michigan, won an award for his thesis, and became the youngest math professor ever at UC Berkeley. He later retired to a cabin in rural Montana and became the Unabomber.
It's important to point out that he was basically emotionally abused by researchers (apparently paid in part by the government) and never really recovered from it. Also that his manifesto (and later works, while in prison) are genuine works of philosophy by a person who really shouldn't ever be let out into society again. Kaczynski is a really interesting guy.
You probably only ever hear of the success stories. I can think of Terry Tao, John von Neumann, and Erik Demaine off the top of my head, not because they were prodigies, but because they have gained enough name recognition that I Google'd them and learned of their early education.
Even if the rest had very interesting research, you wouldn't hear about them outside of their chosen field unless they reached superstar status.
Norbert Wiener[1], founder of cybernetics, was another famous prodigy:
"After graduating from Ayer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, Wiener entered Tufts College. He was awarded a BA in mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies of zoology at Harvard. In 1910 he transferred to Cornell to study philosophy. He graduated in 1911 at 17 years of age."
There are also, of course, many, many more musical and chess prodigies, for example... Mozart probably being the most famous of them all.
Curiously, there don't seem to be any significant prodigy novelists or poets.
Here's one example that I remember from my childhood as she is the same age as me:
"Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark (Hebrew: רות אלקה לורנס-נאימרק, born 2 August 1971) is a British–Israeli mathematician and an associate professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology."
"In 1981 Lawrence passed the Oxford University entrance examination in mathematics, joining St Hugh's College in 1983 at the age of twelve."
Terry Tao turned out well - but he's just one of many.
I know one guy that finished his Bsc in math by age 17, and got accepted to Cambridge - he's a rich fund manager today. Didn't really contribute to science, but interests change with time.
The number of kids featured in such articles is really a drop in the ocean. So, coming to the conclusion that 'having a gift is not synonymous with being successful' is not entirely correct.
As a counter example, Zuck, Sergey Brin and Lady Gaga were identified as talented youth. They may not have been covered by the Economist when they were kids. But all of them are certainly successful in my book.
1. being successful and famous are not the same thing
2. being famous at an early age is probably correlated with wanting to be as far away from the public eye as possible as an adult, if any other options are there.
But also, I was in one of those articles (a long time ago and am now an Old in internet time), so AMA, I guess.
Are you happy? Do you have rewarding work? Do you think your early degree came at the cost of something else? If given the chance would you do it again?
Many people consider child prodigies to be incredibly talented and thus expect great breakthroughs in research from them, e.g. Terrance Tao, but do you feel that talent alone is enough?
Incredible amount of support from my parents through all childhood years definitely played a part. Also, since my baby years, I've always had a lot of learning stimuli - books, computers, extracurriculars etc. Although our family was fairly poor, me having access to knowledge always has been a #1 spending priority.
My career is doing well. I'm a mid-level manager (~40 people report to me) at a multi-billion dollar tech corporation. Although nothing crazy, I'd say it's not bad.
I speak to nine year old relatives: they are barely articulate simians.
What is it like talking to a 9 year old who has completed a 4-year EE degree?
Can you walk up to the kid and say, "Hey, solve this bridge/op-amp circuit's transfer function?" or ask a humanities question, "What are the ethical dilemmas inherent in an open discussion forum?"
I guess this is what it feels like to be a young-earth creationist: I simply cannot wrap my head around a 9-year old being able to answer these question, so like a creationist I choose to believe it is a fake.
>> I guess this is what it feels like to be a young-earth creationist: I simply cannot wrap my head around...
You think you're picking on an easy target there, but if you talked to some, you might actually find a few that will talk about young-earth creationism in the context of something interesting like Einsteins theories of gravitational time dilation. Had an engineering professor like this.
Call it cognitive dissonance or not, but it seems pretty normal to be able to hold two concepts in one's head, even ones that seem to conflict... with the hopes of one day reconciling them.
What's more likely to be going on here is nobody wanted to stand in the way of this kid with all the external pressure to keep pushing the narrative along. Nobody wanted to be the person holding everything up by insisting the submitted paper on Prison Inmate Rehabilitation Programs was very surface level and lacked deep reflection and thoughtfulness.
There's just no way a 9 year old can handle serious research papers or form complex arguments about social and global issues. Two things common in most university general education programs.
Can a 9 year old be good at something specific? Sure... but I'd put my money on this kid was pushed through for the narrative and not for the actual coursework.
On the contrary, there is another school of thought which says that the people who started going to school late in life are much more resilient to difficult situations in life.
When I look at earlier generation (I am 77 born), I notice that they are happier than others in tough times. And the generation younger than me feels irritated when the elders ask them to take it easy or ask them to ignore some comments etc.
The academic competition is taking lives out of people.
Ha, I wonder if everyone was talking about how Terence Tao would be irredeemably damaged psychologically for finishing college at 16. Well, it certainly looks like he's doing well.
> However, unlike most 9-year-olds, he has already worked out what he wants to do with his life: develop artificial organs.
It always worries me to see news like this. I really don't see the benefit of this type of lifestyle for a kid. Even assuming the best case scenario for him it just seems like he's being forced into adulthood too early.
Good on him. But - there's always the question of how much of what he's doing is his own individual will, and how much the result of his parents' influence. Now, of course the former is naturally influenced by the latter, and people can certainly end up pursuing what their parents has hoped, but it can be very difficult emotionally if you "wake up" one day and notice your entire life is invested in some course of progress you're not even sure you really want. Doubly difficult if you get stuck or fail at something, and need to have a strong emotional support for your sense of self-worth and purpose to fall back on.
(This is partially from my own experience, although it's nothing like in the story.)
Wow i so Envy's because this child can hit big leauge so early in that age.
My parents didn't have chance to educate me in higher school and University because only middle school graduate.
If this was normalized, nobody would be panicking about the social ramifications. Put him into a normal middle and high school. Let his brain atrophy. Such is the price we pay.
I'm still a teenager, but I'm in the workforce, but I try to maintain some level of "kid-ness". I still do stupid stuff with my friends, and make out in parking lots. Both are possible, and if this guy is determined, he can skip a lot of the boring parts of life and get to the good stuff.
In this video she is 11. When she was 5 she told her parents she wanted to become a professional drummer. They got her an instructor and she started performing publicly at age 6, and has since gone on to a very successful career.
I once visited some friends in Brussels who worked for the EU parliament. Not in a political capacity. While there I found out about children as young as 9 or 10 who already speak several european languages.
It's really interesting to see what growing up in the political capitol of europe among children to diplomats can do to a kid.
I suspect this is orders of magnitude more common than kids graduating university at 9.
For instance everyone in my extended family speaks 3 languages at least, some 4, due to historical circumstances. It's simply a question of exposure.
If you go to Fribourg in Switzerland there's a whole area where people speak both French, Swiss German, and High German. And these days English as well. The rest of the Swiss at least learn several languages in school, though perhaps not using them constantly.
I don't know so much about electrical engineering, which is the subject in this article. But for mathematics, I don't think it's a great idea to advance to college super early.
One big problem with the plan, which a lot of people don't realize, is that your typical university math degree isn't that much more challenging than doing well in high school math. The people who went, for example, to Ohio State University while they were young, and took their undergrad math classes, generally didn't describe them as very intellectually interesting.
You also just miss the social interactions of having a peer group near your own age. But I think those are more apparent to people. The problem is that you think you're exchanging some social interaction for a great intellectual experience, and then you don't even really get a great intellectual experience.
My recommendation to kids who are great at math and thinking about taking college classes is, don't. If the math classes at your high school are too easy, ask your teachers if you can skip straight to the AP exam. In my experience, teachers who are hesitant to break the rules of the system are more willing to believe the "proof" of an AP exam, and a smart kid can ace an AP exam in a subject they know nothing about with a little bit of cramming.
It's better to wait and go to a top-tier school rather than to start college super early at a medium-tier school.
For math specifically, you can usually just start taking graduate math courses during your freshman year at university. That way, you get the intellectual stimulation of grad school, but the social stimulation of an undergrad program. And if you change your mind and decide you want a career in something other than mathematics, you have plenty of time.