3 ms·
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
by 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 agoI'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 agoBut 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 agoAny examples of those questions?
- knzhou 7y agoWhen 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?
- imbusy111 7y agoHow does a child even know what book to get?
- knzhou 7y agoThese days, you use Google. I personally have a list of books for intro physics [0] and help maintain a meta-list of books up to graduate level [1], and there are hundreds more lists out there. Heck, when I was a kid I learned from just checking out books at random from the local public library, and even that was fine. There's just an avalanche of great free resources out there. 0: https://knzhou.github.io/#writing https://knzhou.github.io/#writing 1: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recommendations https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/12175/book-recom...
- jl2718 7y agoThis might sound weird, but, some parents are not at all supportive of their children’s interests. Their relationship can be one of rivalry and antagonism that punishes success. I met a bunch of misfit prodigy hacker types in the military. At some point we realized that we were all there for the same reason.