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Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]
- canadiantim 8mo agoInteresting it's hosted on gwern...
- poidos 8mo agoGwern hosts a lot of PDFs -- see https://gwern.net/archiving https://gwern.net/archiving
- canadiantim 8mo agoI guess that makes sense in the light of her previous post and work on making a new archiving solution for being able to host singlefile archives more efficiently. Thank you
- elromulous 8mo agoMy brain initially parsed the title as an obituary title and I was really sad for a moment.
- markisus 8mo agoThis really reminded me of the first part Flowers for Algernon. The main character undergoes a treatment which improves is intelligence and the story is narrated via a series of diary entries which become successively more fluent and sophisticated.
- jorl17 8mo agoHad me in tears by the end. One of my favorite books. So glad a friend recommended it to me.
- riffraff 8mo agoI read it decades ago, and from time to time I mention it to someone who has not read it and I end up telling them the story.. and I'm usually tearing up before getting to the end. Such a moving piece.
- h33t-l4x0r 8mo agoNext time think of it as a story of a nice guy, who turns into a jerk, and at the end he's a nice guy again.
- LostMyLogin 8mo agoWe had to read it in middle school and man did it have me in tears at the end.
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- nephihaha 8mo agoGood book, but the film is underwhelming. Saw it fairly recently for the first time.
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- jibal 8mo agoHumbling.
- markus_zhang 8mo agoIndeed. He definitely knows more Math than I do.
- chao- 8mo agoThis brings to mind the childhood of John Stuart Mill: - Learned Greek starting age three. - Was studying Plato at age six. - Studied Latin starting at age eight. And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.
- karmakurtisaani 8mo agoAnd imagine what he could have done if he had done something useful at such a young age!
- piekvorst 8mo agoKnowing Greek, Latin, and Plato is very useful for a philosopher of his times. I’m far from being a fan of Mill’s contributions but he aligned himself well with the western history of philosophy. But if you imply that philosophy as such isn’t useful, it’s simply wrong, if not arrogant. Everyone needs philosophy.
- stevage 8mo agoLearning three languages at an early age is completely unremarkable for millions of people around the world. It's just notable which ones his were.
- lordnacho 8mo agoIt's notable if he learned Greek and Latin from books. Being classical languages, it sounds that way. Most people who learn three languages as a kid are surrounded by other speakers, not books.
- simonh 8mo agoHis father who oversaw his education and possibly both parents, and Bentham that played a role in his education as well, would have known either Greek, or Latin or both as they were considered essential to a rounded education at the time.
- TheChaplain 8mo agoI am interested in his new book, "Six Math Essentials", but I doubt it will be on my very low level of math understanding..
- creamyhorror 8mo agoIncredible. Knowing about Abelian groups, being able to graph y = x^3 — 2x^2 + x in one minute, and performing integration at age 7. Chomping up university-level math textbooks by 8. A classical math prodigy. I definitely empathize with "his preference for using an analytic, highly logical problem-solving strategy" (I'm not a genius ofc). It's often more immediately clear for me than visual/spatial manipulation.
- Liftyee 8mo agoCurious. I admire the analytic side since it's what I consider myself personally weak at. I have always preferred visual and spatial problems (then again, I spent a long time playing with Lego and making things). I wonder how I ought to train up problem solving, given that I have an engineering degree to finish.
- sayamqazi 8mo agoI could have been just like him if I tried hard enough.
- suprjami 8mo agoAt 8 years old I was able to expertly dismantle many radios. Was still a few years away from reassembly.
- nananana9 8mo agoAt 8 years I recycled filesystem directories. I didn't know you can create new folders, so when I needed one I grabbed a random one from C:\Windows, moved it to my desktop and deleted its contents.
- jdthedisciple 8mo agoMakes total sense, it used to be called "Recycle Bin" after all!
- whamlastxmas 8mo agoI wonder if Microsoft did focus group testing and found understandably computer illiterate people were concerned about "trashing" files meant they were somehow permanently using up HDD space
- geoffbp 8mo agoWorked ok til it was a system dir and the system wouldn’t boot anymore? :)
- jdefr89 8mo agoNo better way to learn System32 folder was essential is Windows than by destroying your family computer by removing it.
- energy123 8mo agoI deleted the files from there to free up disk space
- fragmede 8mo ago
- svat 8mo agoDon't miss the program he wrote after teaching himself BASIC from a book at age six (Fig 5 / book page 222 / PDF page 10): > 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"
- nananana9 8mo agoThis does feel like something a super smart alien pretending to be an 8 year old would write.
- whatshisface 8mo agoSometimes I wonder if HNers have met more aliens than 8 year olds.
- dfex 8mo agoThat program listing hit me right in the feels. I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility. I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
- aa-jv 8mo agoFound myself counting characters in case there was an easter egg in there. Spoiler: there isn't an easter egg in there.
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- aurareturn 8mo agoI know it must be obvious but this proves to me that biological intelligence hasn't nearly reached its peak. If we select for pure intelligence, biological brains can get much smarter. Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics. But life doesn't select for pure intelligence, it selects for survival. In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capable humans.
- jama211 8mo agoNot sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?
- jonahx 8mo ago> Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter. Innate ability is real.
- jama211 8mo agoI simply disagree. Yes, they could. Same with adults. Basically no one does. Also I didn’t say innate ability doesn’t exist. But in my opinion is a small multiplier on top of effort. That’s why I said close to.
- petters 8mo agoAs a TA, I've seen adults try to pass initial college calculus many times (and failing - you were allowed to try several times) with enormous effort. It's not a small multiplier And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
- jama211 8mo agoWow, incredible read! Amazing what motivated peple (and children!) can achieve.
- quietthrow 8mo agoGenuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment? Also - We, as a society, tend to celebrate people with “natural didn’t really need to work for” type gifts quite inconsistently - eg A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as a prodigy in maths or science. In both cases the people are fundamentally bestowed with abilities they didn’t really have to work extremely hard to acquire but are perhaps looked at differently. What’s kind of psychology is at play here? Would love to understand how we tend to interpret such things and then form beliefs. I realize and acknowledge both sets had talents and the spent thier time doing something with it to produce something extraordinary but we seem to tend to overlook the massive head start they also had. Why so? (Totally understandable if you feel like downvoting but I would ask you to articulate and share the cord it struck with you if you down vote)
- EugeneOZ 8mo agoIt depends on how much value their talents can bring to humankind, I guess.
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoVery good guess, right on the money Too bad humankind is almost never paying attention.
- jdthedisciple 8mo ago> A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as a prodigy in maths or science We living on the same planet? Pretty sure the supermodel gets infinitely more attention and certainly makes orders of magnitudes more money than some math prodigy, at least on mine.
- globular-toast 8mo agoThere is an inequality between the sexes here. A female model does indeed get more attention and money based purely on the genes they didn't have to work for. It's not the case for men, though. Men also have to actually deliver something, whether it's being a performer like an actor, singer, footballer etc, or winning the Field's medal which you don't just get for being quite good at maths when you're 8. Trying to think of men who are famous just for genetics is quite hard. I guess like Orlando Bloom or the members of K-pop bands and whatnot, but they still have to perform and can't just prance around in fancy clothes and call it a day. In the case of Tao, if he had just decided to do something else or not accomplished anything you'd never have heard of him. Men always have to work for it. Women often don't, and if they try it doesn't work. It's the source of a lot of disgruntlement between the sexes, but probably a "grass is always greener" thing.
- impossiblefork 8mo agoI like that test where some of the questions are wrong and wonder whether we should have that kind of thing in maths textbooks. I think people need to be trained to be more confident in what they know, and if we gave them that kind of thing we could maybe train them to become so.
- alisonkisk 8mo agoI didn't see that in the document. What page is it on?
- OJFord 8mo agoI think they mean at the bottom of p216 (pdf page 4), where he says he doesn't know, r+s=80 but there isn't enough information to solve for r and s.
- impossiblefork 8mo agoThere's two questions that are intended to be wrong (probably to test confidence). One with insufficient information and where the question itself implies falsehoods.
- impossiblefork 8mo agoThe questions are on page 215 (3/26) and Tao's answers are on the next page.
- andyferris 8mo agoActually - do they do this in LLM benchmarks? As a measure of overconfidence/confabulation? Seems immediately applicable.
- impossiblefork 8mo agoI don't think it's a common thing in any public LLM benchmarks or in any standard QA datasets. Maybe in internal stuff at AI firms.
- Jun8 8mo agoI read this earlier today and was thinking: how many such mathematically gifted individuals exist I. The world at one time? Assuming there are probably 20-30 Tao-caliber people in the US and an adversarial multiplier of 0.1 (only 1 in 10 such kids are nurtured), we reach 300 for this generation, about 1 in a million. That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.
- mmooss 8mo agoHow about nurturing them with human beings? We have no idea how nurturing children with a computer program would turn out but probably poorly. The most important part of nurturing, as I understand it, is to be seen and loved by other humans, and to be made to feel safe and lovable.
- bigfishrunning 8mo ago> Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions. Yes, let's give them only the blandest, most boring interactions possible.
- Darkstryder 8mo agoAs a father of an 8 years old, this is very moving. While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.
- SJC_Hacker 8mo agoCan't find the reference but from an interview with his parents there apparently there wasn't much "nurturing" other than simply making available the necessary materials which he gobbled up. Its not like they put a made him practice for an hour a day. A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.
- MrOrelliOReilly 8mo agoI think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave. More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
- fifilura 8mo agoSure. But what about the parents who struggle every day with normally gifted children? They deserve even more credit. This seems like an easy child :)
- kakacik 8mo agoOne needs to be a (long term present) parent to understand these subtleties. You also hear just the success stories which are often extremely marginal, when such approach wouldn't fit development curve of some other potential genius we would not be hearing their less successful story, would we. Not diminishing the overall message, in 80s even in western democracies deeper info was not so readily available so its not like his parents just threw him wifi-connected tablet with wikipedia opened and that was it. But I think what should be celebrated more is some proper hard long term effort and not just usual approach with exceptional results.
- MaintenanceMode 8mo agoHe’s on Star Talk this week. https://overcast.fm/+AAzXlUoaiV0 https://overcast.fm/+AAzXlUoaiV0
- arjie 8mo agoHow interesting that it describes "meeting Terence's special needs". In isolation, that sentence today would mean the opposite of what that person intended it to mean. For a bit in my childhood "differently abled" was the one people went with, but it seems that "special needs" was contemporaneous and just seems to have won. Differently abled does seem awfully obviously euphemistic.
- Jolter 8mo agoIn a school context, it is (or should be) just as important to consider each child’s need for being appropriately challenged as it is to consider their need for support.
- mmooss 8mo agoI wonder if Terence agreed to have this published. This is an intimate look into the private life of an eight year old, written up as something like a lab report; it's not research on bacteria or monkeys or anonymous study subjects. It's possible that he did give permission, of course.
- alisonkisk 8mo agoHe was 7 years old, so it was impossible for him to give consent for anything. His parents gave consent on his behalf.
- mmooss 8mo agoI didn't realize this was published at the time. Still, I wonder what the current, adult Terence thinks. Whether or not legal recourse is available doesn't change Tao's feelings about it and isn't determinative regarding republishing it now is a good idea.
- ChaitanyaSai 8mo agoFascinating read! And very interesting in the light of recent advances in AI to think about what makes this ability possible. How far can we go with increasing long-term memory and working memory? Does increasing comprehension follow with competence? Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly? Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them? Ramunujam seems to have had this.
- ACS_Solver 8mo agoThis is one of the most interesting questions to me about human brains, and as far as I know no significant progress has been made in answering it. Some people appear to have a capacity for learning, retention and understanding that is well outside the normal range. People like Ramanujan or von Neumann, or Tao. They learn at a speed that far exceeds the speed of what we would consider gifted students, they reach a deep and intuitive understanding of the material, and go on to make many discoveries / inventions of which even one would be enough for an ordinary scientist to be considered successful. It seems there is something very different about their minds, but just what is it that allows those minds to operate at such a level?
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoCould be something even more difficult to identify that keeps everyone else from doing it.
- Markoff 8mo agoTerence Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian and American mathematician. He is a Fields medalist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing, analytic number theory and the applications of artificial intelligence in mathematics.[4][5] ... A child prodigy,[18] Terence Tao skipped five grades.[19][20] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[21] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[7][22] Saved you a click...
- defrost 8mo agoSee also: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terence+Tao https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terence+Tao The HN mods apparently have a sign in the HN control room It's been [ ] days since the last Terrence Tao submission
- arrowsmith 8mo agoFor a split second I read this headline as "Terence Tao dead at … years old" and was shocked
- alkonaut 8mo agoProving, that the idea that "no matter how good you are at anything there's some 8 year old who is much better" held true even before social media had to tell it to my face every day.
- POBIX 8mo agoEspecially interesting since intelligence is much more environmental than most people assume: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-n...
- small_model 8mo agoWhen will a SOTA model beat the best mathematician on earth? Similar to Chess and Go examples. It has to be getting close.
- throwawayk7h 8mo agoWhat's his secret to eternal youth? He's 50 now but he still looks 25.
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoAsian.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 8mo agoHe looks around his age to me, were you looking at old pics?
- keiferski 8mo agoI just read this yesterday in Conversations with Walter Murch, a well-known film editor. Not exactly the same, but I do get the sense that Tao still feels the same way about math: As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. Interviewer: Yes—something that had and still has the feeling of a hobby, a curiosity. M: At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly in by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you thinkyou “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven.
- abcd_f 8mo ago> when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. As endearing as it sounds, that's pure selection bias on Walter's end rather than something even remotely common. Clearly there are cases of this sort, like arts and other creative tangents, but on average it's a result of a discovery process much later in life.
- neosat 8mo agoI don't think Walter is implying anything about how common or uncommon this is. His core insight seems fairly objective and plausible to me: "...your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old". I.e. if you do end up being lucky and wise to do something as a profession closely related to what you *loved* doing when you were ~11 , because you end up spending time doing what you love (and equally importantly not spend that time doing something that sucks up energy) you increase your chances of being happier.
- keiferski 8mo agoI think you completely missed the point of his anecdote. It’s not a scientific study, he is merely saying that at age 9-11, you’re old enough to have a decent understanding of what you’re interested in, but not old enough to start worrying about social and financial pressures and expectations. And so the thing you were interested in at that age is probably similar to what you’ll be interested in now, if you remove social and financial expectations.
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- gigatexal 8mo agoWell I was playing doom 2 and tinkering with old computers. Guess I ended up doing what I loved despite a brief stint where I fancied myself some big wig powerful broker on Wall Street having studied economics at uni.
- XCSme 8mo agoFun read. Math makes so much intuitive sense in his head.
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo agoOkay, so? Has any of this research been used for anything? Or is it all nerd snipe set theory nonsense?
- wanderlust123 8mo agoHonestly a quick google would tell you what you want to know. But something tells me you must consider yourself an other worldly genius if you consider any part of set theory as nonsense.
- DiscourseFan 8mo agoWell its not nonsense, and its very interesting, but its just a certain formulation of logic in the end, nothing more or less.
- graphcolorer 8mo agoI like this part very much: More than three years after this episode took place, Terence, still a little boy, happily played hide and seek with his two younger brothers when the Tao family visited the Clements household. He is a happy, well-mannered lad who obviously loves and respects his parents and his two brothers. He gets on well with others, too. Mr John Fidge, his Year 11 Mathematics teacher at Blackwood High School for the first two terms of 1983, told me that after he had been attending the Year 11 Mathematics classes for about a fortnight he was accepted as just another member of the class. He is always willing to volunteer answers to questions asked by his teachers and was regarded as a friendly, humble, but very bright boy by his classmates.
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago> he entries marked with an asterisk (*) were to take place at Bellevue Heights Primary School (Year 5) and the others at Blackwood High School (year 8: General Studies, Year 11: Physics, Year 12: Mathematics). So he was able to attend classes out of his own year. What country is this? USA? Is that normal in the USA? I think here in the UK this isn't possible.
- shric 8mo agoAustralia
- piker 8mo agoPresumably Australia where he’s from, but also possible in the U.S.
- defrost 8mo agoAs others said, Australia. Like Terence I also had "out of band" classes and free time to read advance material in both primary and high school. During that period Australia also had good federal and state programs for clustering advanced kids on yearly subsidised specialist camps - optional and free if parents couldn't afford to chip in. I bumped into him at the same time Paul Erdős was doing the rounds and hanging out with anyone that might show promise.
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoDo you have any idea how one would go about understanding the current status quo in terms of advancing kids? E.g. which countries do it etc.
- defrost 8mo agoIf the goal is to map the global status quo on education, the answer is to go country by country and ideally visit as many as possible. This was the path mayself and others followed when we wanted to map the current state of global mineral and resource extraction. ie Grind. Particularly during the Cold War years emphasis was placed by major powers on intellectual and physical achievements, countries dedicated resources to hothousing swimmers, runners, chess players, musicians, etc. If your specific interest is "gifted" children, TT wrote this some years past: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifted-education/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifte... I'd add to that a number of peer children with various gifts I grew up with never wanted to (for example) play the violin ever again. Push too hard and you can easily blow it. More generally, advancing children en masse is likely still "done best" by Finland, a country considered by many to have the best general education system. All the teachers are university educated in <subject> + "education" (the act of educating) and they adopt a policy of stability, resourcing, active teaching (teacher lectures class) and near equal time for student activity (half the class time spent by students doing stuff for themselves related to topic). Policy wise, it's not all about the super brains - the trades are hard and demand skills, it's good to have parallel streams; applied STEM for some, apprentiships for others, AND (in my opinion at least) a mixing of the two - giant autonomous 240 tonne trucks don't build themselves, someone has to lathe out massive hydraulic cylinders and control rods and levers that others have to control via funky math stuff. Here in W.Australia the capital city Perth has a number of specialist high schools - Performing Arts ones that feed into WAAPA (post high school level performance), an aviation focused high school my son attended where each intake year builds their own aircraft to fly ( https://www.kentstreetshs.wa.edu.au/aviation https://www.kentstreetshs.wa.edu.au/aviation ), etc. These are state schools (free) that are general schools (like all the others) with additional Specialist Programs. There are some 190+ odd countries about the globe, it would take some time to table out the education programmes in each.
- thiago_fm 8mo agoHe was a prodigy, but I believe the average American would be surprised that almost all classes in China have a person like him, or even more. Raw IQ, analytical and rational minds are common there. His biggest talent though, I believe it's something more rare. He can get people excited about mathematics, make people dream and imagine.
- the_arun 8mo agoI watched a video of Terrance Tao - https://youtu.be/ukpCHo5v-Gc?si=7MqSwDanZycSEVmm https://youtu.be/ukpCHo5v-Gc?si=7MqSwDanZycSEVmm & noticed he speaks fast and assumed he must be high functioning. Then realized, I mistook him for his Autistic brother Trevor. Trevor too is a mathematician. Like others called out their parents must be great too. It is not easy.
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- gverrilla 8mo ago> Terence tends to read whole books rather than parts of books. Funny remark.
- meffmadd 8mo agoI really wonder what motivates a seven year old to persistently work on that „one thing“ and not get distracted/bored. I guess he knew he was special?
- wumms 8mo ago> His primary school principal described him as ‘a happy little fellow who has a clear understanding of the fact that he is different’.
- lowdude 8mo agoI believe it comes down to intrinsic interest, that he would not consider this something boring he needs to work through, but rather something fun and intriguing to spend his time on. Disregarding the unusual age in this case, I believe that most people could be significantly better at mathematics than they are, if only they found it interesting enough.
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- drited 8mo agoCultivating that passion is an art. A modern tool which I've found great to let my kids grow their math ability is the game Prodigy Math. Worth checking out - it's fun (do math to gain spellcasting ability in the game) and gently pushes the envelope of what they can do. It emails parents with details on what math problems the child didn't get right and with sample exercises to address those areas. I have no connection to them other than being a customer.
- PacificSpecific 8mo agoThe music in that game is sublime
- qmr 8mo agoHey thanks for this recommendation I'm going to check it out. Have you tried Dragon Box? I've had my son doing that for awhile. Parent reporting is lacking. Also briefly did Khan Academy Kids but he's so far ahead that seems pretty useless now.
- drited 8mo agoWe haven't tried Dragon Box. Thank you for the recommendation, we will check it out
- goolz 8mo agoThis brings back great memories of a game I played as a kid called 24. Not so much modern, just cards with four numbers that you would add, subtract, multiply and divide to get the center number. Then you would slap the card and explain. It did something to my brain as even the thought of those cards makes me smile.
- fonheponho 8mo agoOne of the most fascinating and moving writings I've read in my life.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoI'd love to know what his true introduction to mathematics was. What books, etc. What created that spark and interest.
- lich_king 8mo agoSince the discussion here focuses mostly on child prodigies in general, I'd note that there are many studies showing that the usual outcomes for gifted kids are not all that great. I think the issue is that it's just harder to fit in. I remember being way ahead in some classes in middle school, and I actually ending up drawing the ire of some teachers when I had answers to every question (let alone corrected them). I eventually learned to disengage and just look out the window. But if you develop that attitude, you never learn how to cram in knowledge for tests, which actually increases the odds of failing some "less interesting" classes down the line. Another problem that I've seen with a lot of really clever folks is that if you're told your entire childhood you're smarter than others, but you see these "others" sometimes get more successful, it's really easy to fall into profound cynicism. You never try anything and just undermine others on the internet. Ultimately, stories like this are an exception, not a rule, even for kids who are truly brilliant. And yeah, it's easy to underestimate the role the parents play, mostly in creating the right opportunities and instilling the right way of thinking about the world. A child doesn't learn to play piano at the age of eight unless there's a piano in the home and a family member or a paid tutor to show them the ropes. Even for stuff like math, it's a parent's choice to buy the right books versus just giving the kid a smartphone.
- zozbot234 8mo agoThese stories are quite common. It just goes to prove that the point of modern mass schooling is just to corral the kids in and provide daycare, not really an education.
- eager_learner 8mo agoExactly! 12 years of 'knowledge' half of it useless, the other half could be taught in 3 years--if done properly.
- Viliam1234 8mo agoI think it does provide some education for the average child. It's just when you are not average that it fails you.
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- hirvi74 8mo agoI have watched some interviews with Tao as the guest. I must say, despite his insane abilities, he also seems like a down to Earth individual. I never have gotten the impression that he is arrogant or thinks he is truly better than anyone else. In fact, I have seen nothing but the opposite from him. It's quite a nice change of pace from some of the other elites in various fields.
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- markus_zhang 8mo agoI’d kudos his parents. The parents deliberately brought themselves out of the picture, but as a parent I know how hard it is. No, I don’t mean it is hard to feed a kid and educate him a bit. That’s like at least 70% of the parents can do. What is remarkable is that they not only found Terence’s interests and nurtured on it, consistently without any major error. God you have no idea how hard it is. So many constellations have to be on the right places. And it’s definitely way more than luck. For a starter, as a parent of a five years old kid, I always feel I failed and will fail my kiddo. I’m so unsatisfied with my own lives that my mind has to be focused on improving myself other than devoting time for anyone else, including my wife and my son. I know my son has some potential, just like pretty much every kid out there, but I didn’t, and won’t take the time to learn early education and use the knowledge to nurture him properly. I know he has some shortcomings that could use some guidance, but I don’t want to spend months, years to figure that out. I’m swarmed by my own thoughts and needs. That’s why I always tell my friends, don’t get a kid if you are not contend with life —- you won’t have the capacity. And then there is the question of what to do even if I have enough time. Kids aren’t robots. They don’t automatically do things you want them to do, which is understandable. But when you have to fight for simple things in life, or fight with wife if you don’t always agree on certain things, God it’s such a mess that struggling to live like a normal human being is not a trivial task. Anyway, I’m really glad that his parents brought out the best of him, and his brother’s too. They should be recognized for that.
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoPhew this resonated with me. Before becoming a parent I'd always thought "when I have a kid I'll teach him such and such" but now turns out that my kid just wants to jump around and break things. I don't know, let me know if you want to talk. Mine is little over 4yo.
- markus_zhang 8mo agoI get it. 4 years old is a threshold. After that you can reason with them. Before that they are just mini terminators. I guess parenting is a bit easier if your interests/work align with the kid’s interests. But if not then it’s going to be tough, because parents only have time to do one thing extra, so they either have to ignore the kids and do what they love, or forfeit what they love and do what the kids may or may not want. And then most kids are average in most of the ways but have sparks here and there, so it’s again the question of “do I invest here for a bunch of money and one year or just skip for the next?”. My father was very into building me as a pianist and a math wizard from early on, neither of which I had strong interests in, but nevertheless I dragged on for many years. I think he gave up the Math part when I was in early middle school and the piano part when I said I don’t want to go to a music school. I wouldn’t be surprised if I cost him a whole career. He was one of the top Mathematicians in my country back then but he didn’t publish much after I was born. All for what? I don’t want to repeat his mistake.
- drivebyhooting 8mo agoI would really like to know the origin story better. Accounts make it sound like Terence learned to read and arithmetic completely on his own by being plopped in front of Sesame Street. That strains credulity. Those familiar with common Chinese parenting strategies know how involved and directly instructed they can be at times. How much of that has been downplayed (And for what purpose)? I don’t mean to undermine any of Tao’s achievements. They are unassailable. But I genuinely want to know a true account of what it took to get him there.
- azan_ 8mo ago> But I genuinely want to know a true account of what it took to get him there. I guess it's being one of the biggest geniuses in the history. Why people find it so hard to accept that there can be HUGE differences in intellectual capabilities and that parenting does not account for even 1% of that? I can bet that if Tao's parents did same things they did for him to 1000 of random children, none would come even remotely close to Tao.
- drivebyhooting 8mo agoYou _guess_. It’s quite acceptable, but still learning from watching Sesame Street?
- kccqzy 8mo agoI found it very interesting that Terence Tao also did not like doing mental visualizations and preferred non-visual analytic methods (page 225). This strongly matches my own experience. I am also not a fan of doing visualizations in my head. I was once asked to do a visual test that’s similar to tower of Hanoi, and I just can’t do it visually, even though I have studied this problem when learning recursion and could formulate a solution easily analytically.
- beasthacker 8mo agoLoved this piece. Especially that it is written in a Gonzo journalism style, including the author as part of the narrative, like a Hunter S. Thompson essay.
- Beijinger 8mo agoQuestion: What options are there for a highly gifted kid in Jersey City? 6 years old. He currently attends a normal school and I feel this a such a waste. (not my kid).
- jesuslop 8mo agoThe tidbit about continuous fractions is actually of use if you have a casual interest. It is a humbling experience to delve in his grown-up blog.