5 ms·

What strikes me the most is the amount of support he received and the people he was able to meet when he was a child. I don't want to dismiss his talent, but th

What strikes me the most is the amount of support he received and the people he was able to meet when he was a child. I don't want to dismiss his talent, but this level of support is NOT available to 99%+ of population. His parents have done a wonderful job. To recall my days as an undergraduate at a well-known UK university studying mathematics - large classes (300+) where everyone is disposable, nothing to do but sleep on the table when you work through the problems quickly at a workshop, no interesting projects or opportunities to latch on to develop yourself, nothing to do for days but party, waste talent and occasionally read a math book to catch up. Essentially you are hammered to be average until maybe you enter a PhD course. At that point it is too late.

jitendrac 7y ago
+1, Kudos to the view. I also believe the support matters. There are many overqualified students who cannot skip grades because of the system, Most probably students graduates at the average age of 22-23 and then PHD and research may well take 6-7 years if not skipped, meanwhile the presence of good mentor is also a luck.
srj203 7y ago
It is important to note that it is indeed about his parents doing a wonderful job, and not about them being very rich or something. The article http://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10116 http://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10116 describes this nicely. Nothing that has been done for his early education required lots of money. (Obviously, being in a developed country like Australia helped a lot --- but one can imagine something similar being done in almost any densely populated urban area in the world.) However, almost everything in his very early age required large amounts of time, thinking, and attention by his parents. If you have enough time, and your young children are interested in something, don't leave them to figure it out themselves.
knzhou 7y ago
Sure, Tao's an outlier among outliers, but in general nurturing a prodigy does not require a lot of parental time or money. I've met a number of such prodigies in the course of my work, and generally their parental involvement amounts to buying them a book every few months, at their kid's insistence. The kids then teach themselves, often by sneaking glances at their books or math problems while hiding out at the back of a standard school classroom. They are not more privileged or supported than the average middle class child in a first world country. The world's best educational resources are dropping rapidly in price; with some searching, you can even get an mathematical education up to what Tao knew in graduate school completely for free.
- lonesword 7y ago
  > I've met a number of such prodigies in the course of my work If you don't mind, can you elaborate more on what kind of work you do? Do you run a school for the gifted (assuming such a thing exists)?
  - knzhou 7y ago
    I've taught at the U.S. Physics Olympiad's training camp, and also tutor high school students who want to learn a ton of physics quickly. (These kids usually find me themselves, through Google.) My most obnoxiously smart student was this 12 year old who would interrupt my lectures on classical mechanics with tricky questions I couldn't solve. The next year he came back, doing the same thing but for quantum mechanics, and the year after that he got bored of this and enrolled in an elite college. I want to stress that none of this required great wealth or privilege. The cost for his books was a small fraction of what other middle class parents would pay for, say, music lessons or SAT tutoring.
    - aspaceman 7y ago
      But a parent has to sign the permission slip for training camp, or drive the kid to tutoring. It's harder (not impossible of course) when the parent is abusive or antagonistic.
    - 77pt77 7y ago
      Any examples of those questions?
      - knzhou 7y ago
        When covering Huygen's principle: the wavelets always give a backwards-moving wave in addition to the forwards-moving wave. In other words, Huygen's principle is time symmetric. So in real life, why don't you get the backwards wave? When covering the principle of least action: often, applying it will give infinitely many solutions, or none at all. An example with no solutions would be the harmonic oscillator with x(0) = 0, x(t) = 0, and t not a multiple of half the period. An example with infinitely many solutions would be the principle of least time applied between the two foci of an ellipse with reflecting walls. So what happens in these cases? Does Lagrangian mechanics just not work?

jitendrac 7y ago

+1, Kudos to the view. I also believe the support matters. There are many overqualified students who cannot skip grades because of the system, Most probably students graduates at the average age of 22-23 and then PHD and research may well take 6-7 years if not skipped, meanwhile the presence of good mentor is also a luck.

srj203 7y ago

It is important to note that it is indeed about his parents doing a wonderful job, and not about them being very rich or something. The article http://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10116 http://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10116 describes this nicely. Nothing that has been done for his early education required lots of money. (Obviously, being in a developed country like Australia helped a lot --- but one can imagine something similar being done in almost any densely populated urban area in the world.) However, almost everything in his very early age required large amounts of time, thinking, and attention by his parents. If you have enough time, and your young children are interested in something, don't leave them to figure it out themselves.

knzhou 7y ago

Sure, Tao's an outlier among outliers, but in general nurturing a prodigy does not require a lot of parental time or money. I've met a number of such prodigies in the course of my work, and generally their parental involvement amounts to buying them a book every few months, at their kid's insistence. The kids then teach themselves, often by sneaking glances at their books or math problems while hiding out at the back of a standard school classroom. They are not more privileged or supported than the average middle class child in a first world country. The world's best educational resources are dropping rapidly in price; with some searching, you can even get an mathematical education up to what Tao knew in graduate school completely for free.

lonesword 7y ago
> I've met a number of such prodigies in the course of my work If you don't mind, can you elaborate more on what kind of work you do? Do you run a school for the gifted (assuming such a thing exists)?
- knzhou 7y ago
  I've taught at the U.S. Physics Olympiad's training camp, and also tutor high school students who want to learn a ton of physics quickly. (These kids usually find me themselves, through Google.) My most obnoxiously smart student was this 12 year old who would interrupt my lectures on classical mechanics with tricky questions I couldn't solve. The next year he came back, doing the same thing but for quantum mechanics, and the year after that he got bored of this and enrolled in an elite college. I want to stress that none of this required great wealth or privilege. The cost for his books was a small fraction of what other middle class parents would pay for, say, music lessons or SAT tutoring.
  - aspaceman 7y ago
    But a parent has to sign the permission slip for training camp, or drive the kid to tutoring. It's harder (not impossible of course) when the parent is abusive or antagonistic.
  - 77pt77 7y ago
    Any examples of those questions?
    - knzhou 7y ago
      When covering Huygen's principle: the wavelets always give a backwards-moving wave in addition to the forwards-moving wave. In other words, Huygen's principle is time symmetric. So in real life, why don't you get the backwards wave? When covering the principle of least action: often, applying it will give infinitely many solutions, or none at all. An example with no solutions would be the harmonic oscillator with x(0) = 0, x(t) = 0, and t not a multiple of half the period. An example with infinitely many solutions would be the principle of least time applied between the two foci of an ellipse with reflecting walls. So what happens in these cases? Does Lagrangian mechanics just not work?