One thing I would point out is that child prodigies typically regress to the mean; if you took her, say, 5yo IQ scores, they generally correlate something like

One thing I would point out is that child prodigies typically regress to the mean; if you took her, say, 5yo IQ scores, they generally correlate something like r=.5 with final adult IQ scores, so if she was, say, 190 then (+6SD) you would expect an adult score averaging more like 145 now. Very impressive but not extraordinarily rare or historic. IQ scores don't really stabilize until about middle school, and this is one reason why selecting for really smart young kids doesn't work as well as if you wait until middle/high school to do your screening. (I think part of it is that child prodigies are as much about accelerated growth as about their final potential, and benefit from things like getting adult-levels of working memory much earlier than their peers, but I'm not really an expert on G&T stuff.) Anyway, she may be one in a few million but only in the USA. Most of the world has much lower average IQ scores (unsurprisingly, given economic, medical, and educational conditions in poorer countries, which is most of the non-USA countries), and one of the properties of the normal distribution is that a shift in the mean reduces the extremes much more than you would expect, like 8x or more. So you may be overestimating the number of people globally by quite a bit. Promethea's case is strange and sad, but the journalist notes that some of her excuses don't wash: lots of STEM grad students get stipends and financial support, and she should be able to get way more than your average grad student. Not to mention the many options she has for much better paying jobs than tutoring students - there's no way someone with her talent who was going to get a CS degree can't get a decent programming job or find another way to make money. I might be reading this into it, but I think she's just satisfied with her life and doesn't want to leave her mom.