10 ms·

As 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 h

As 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 7mo ago
Can'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 7mo ago
  I 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 7mo ago
    Sure. 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 7mo ago
      One 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.
      - fifilura 7mo ago
        It is unclear to me what you are trying to say.
        kakacik 7mo ago
        Apologies I am not a native speaker so sometimes more complex thoughts take long sentences to explain. We are discussing his parent's contribution to his growth. Some, like me, tend to agree they just gave him (good) tools and he found his interest and way through and beyond due to superior analytical skills and overall intelligence, not through some super duper tutoring by them. I have cca such cousin. He was way ahead of his class (which was already math-focused class from secondary school), geniune interest in deeper math, physics and philosophy from early age. Even very good at software development in old Pascal or C. Nobody was tutoring him in any way, he just went to public library and borrowed what he liked. The stuff thats not hard but still counts as discovery and learning must be self-motivating in way more average folks simply don't experience, not with same topics.
        markus_zhang 7mo ago
        His parents, as an old saying in my country, must have done a tremendous amount of good things in their previous life to be rewarded with an easy kid :P
  - koolba 7mo ago
    > I 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. And most modern parents would swamp the child with a bunch of mind rotting auto playing TV and video games. There's an account of Terence's time at university where he nearly fails his oral qualifying exams as he spent most of his time playing Civ rather than studying anything. Imagine the travesty for the world if 5 year old Terence had been handed an Xbox.
    - Aperocky 7mo ago
      He would just become a software engineer like the rest of us, and probably would have started google or netflix.
      - swftarrow 7mo ago
        Possibly- but a prodigious intellect and capacity doesn't necessarily translate to "founder" type entrepreneurial talents.
  - throwforfeds 7mo ago
    Yeah I agree, an 8 year old isn't setting up these meetings and correspondences. I think beyond even having supportive parents, the most important part was that he had a parent that had a degree in the field that he happened to be a genius in. His mother knew exactly how to guide her child through the material, even if it just was to let him go off to a corner and read the books she guided him towards for 3-4 hours a day for fun. So many children have advanced proclivities for certain things and parents that just can't even see what it is their child is brilliant at. Having someone that knows the path and can point it out to them is a beautiful thing to have as a child.
    - markus_zhang 7mo ago
      I think gene and characteristics are more important than knowledge and degree. I happen to have two parents who are both in education, one teaches in university and one teaches in middle schools. Because of this I also know many friends whose parents are also teachers. Without any statistical significance, but nonetheless the sample size is greater than 5. None of us consider their parents to be great, or even good teachers. All kids squandered sometime after they are free from the parents, usually in universities. This experience impacts me so much, that I have a bias that teachers should not teach their own kids.
      - throwforfeds 7mo ago
        A parent of mine was also a teacher, and other than grading their student's 9th grade math exams when I was in elementary school, I was on my own for most of my learning. So I agree that yes, just having a parent who is a teacher doesn't necessarily get you much, outside of likely being in a home environment where school is deemed important (many don't have this unfortunately). But where things become slightly magical is when you have a genetically gifted child and a parent that both knows how to guide that genius and has the resources to do so.
        markus_zhang 7mo ago
        Yeah, and can be worse if they are arrogant and thinks they know everything about teaching. That’s why I said characteristics is important.
- matsemann 7mo ago
  > and later on won the Putnam one year Just the once, though, huh? [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    Hehe, that one will never die. It's the comment that more or less defines HN.
- hnfong 7mo ago
  Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things. With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.
  - boppo1 7mo ago
    Please elaborate
    - fifilura 7mo ago
      We pressure our kids into grit, but genius comes from the inside. Be grateful when it happens, but be happy if it does not.
      - vlovich123 7mo ago
        Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement only reached by much less than 1% of all active players. To me that’s genius level. Also, it’s not necessarily an accident that the youngest is the one to have attained the best result. Evidence is quite clear that older siblings can help their younger ones achieve more faster because the younger ones see it as a path to follow/if they can I can. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf
        zozbot234 7mo ago
        Yes, but that kind of aristocratic tutoring is not scalable to the bulk of the population. You need the equivalent of deep PhD expertise in every subject to accomplish that, and even AIs are nowhere close to that level.
- ferguess_k 7mo ago
  I think they deliberately underplayed their role in this. Especially with Asian parents who think such nurturing is part of the "norm". I wouldn't be surprised that they spent TONs of time tutoring him when he was young -- and when he was more or less self-bootstrapped they don't need to spend too much time. But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.
- kccqzy 7mo ago
  That’s simply not quite true if you read the article. When Terence Tao got stuck on a continued fraction problem, his mother told him to use the quadratic. In contrast when I was a kid and was thinking about optimizing my program to print all prime numbers, my mother, instead of telling me about the sieve of Eratosthenes, told me to do school-approved math instead. Now shoutout to my actual math teacher, who, having been told that I got stuck on writing a program to solve simultaneous linear equations, told me about Gaussian elimination.
hgomersall 7mo ago
In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
  > If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? He learned to read and write by himself. I'm pretty sure he would've been fine regardless of shape.
  - simsla 7mo ago
    And that's probably the opposite of being school-shaped. School is hellishly boring if you're ahead of the curve.
    - mlrtime 7mo ago
      The pdf linked seems to disagree with your assessment, at least for Tao.
      - agrounds 7mo ago
        Agreed. But generally it very much depends on the school and the effort of those in and around it. Terrence was very fortunate to have parents who supported him and likely lobbied for his unconventional high school/primary school split education, and equally fortunate that his schools were able and willing to accommodate him.
    - kenjackson 7mo ago
      That's a specific school problem. I think being school-shaped is not about being bored, but more about being willing to do tasks on a schedule and can learn a lot of material through a lecture style.
  - 7mo ago

SJC_Hacker 7mo ago

Can'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 7mo ago
I 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 7mo ago
  Sure. 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 7mo ago
    One 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.
    - fifilura 7mo ago
      It is unclear to me what you are trying to say.
      - kakacik 7mo ago
        Apologies I am not a native speaker so sometimes more complex thoughts take long sentences to explain. We are discussing his parent's contribution to his growth. Some, like me, tend to agree they just gave him (good) tools and he found his interest and way through and beyond due to superior analytical skills and overall intelligence, not through some super duper tutoring by them. I have cca such cousin. He was way ahead of his class (which was already math-focused class from secondary school), geniune interest in deeper math, physics and philosophy from early age. Even very good at software development in old Pascal or C. Nobody was tutoring him in any way, he just went to public library and borrowed what he liked. The stuff thats not hard but still counts as discovery and learning must be self-motivating in way more average folks simply don't experience, not with same topics.
        markus_zhang 7mo ago
        His parents, as an old saying in my country, must have done a tremendous amount of good things in their previous life to be rewarded with an easy kid :P
- koolba 7mo ago
  > I 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. And most modern parents would swamp the child with a bunch of mind rotting auto playing TV and video games. There's an account of Terence's time at university where he nearly fails his oral qualifying exams as he spent most of his time playing Civ rather than studying anything. Imagine the travesty for the world if 5 year old Terence had been handed an Xbox.
  - Aperocky 7mo ago
    He would just become a software engineer like the rest of us, and probably would have started google or netflix.
    - swftarrow 7mo ago
      Possibly- but a prodigious intellect and capacity doesn't necessarily translate to "founder" type entrepreneurial talents.
- throwforfeds 7mo ago
  Yeah I agree, an 8 year old isn't setting up these meetings and correspondences. I think beyond even having supportive parents, the most important part was that he had a parent that had a degree in the field that he happened to be a genius in. His mother knew exactly how to guide her child through the material, even if it just was to let him go off to a corner and read the books she guided him towards for 3-4 hours a day for fun. So many children have advanced proclivities for certain things and parents that just can't even see what it is their child is brilliant at. Having someone that knows the path and can point it out to them is a beautiful thing to have as a child.
  - markus_zhang 7mo ago
    I think gene and characteristics are more important than knowledge and degree. I happen to have two parents who are both in education, one teaches in university and one teaches in middle schools. Because of this I also know many friends whose parents are also teachers. Without any statistical significance, but nonetheless the sample size is greater than 5. None of us consider their parents to be great, or even good teachers. All kids squandered sometime after they are free from the parents, usually in universities. This experience impacts me so much, that I have a bias that teachers should not teach their own kids.
    - throwforfeds 7mo ago
      A parent of mine was also a teacher, and other than grading their student's 9th grade math exams when I was in elementary school, I was on my own for most of my learning. So I agree that yes, just having a parent who is a teacher doesn't necessarily get you much, outside of likely being in a home environment where school is deemed important (many don't have this unfortunately). But where things become slightly magical is when you have a genetically gifted child and a parent that both knows how to guide that genius and has the resources to do so.
      - markus_zhang 7mo ago
        Yeah, and can be worse if they are arrogant and thinks they know everything about teaching. That’s why I said characteristics is important.
matsemann 7mo ago
> and later on won the Putnam one year Just the once, though, huh? [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  Hehe, that one will never die. It's the comment that more or less defines HN.
hnfong 7mo ago
Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things. With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.
- boppo1 7mo ago
  Please elaborate
  - fifilura 7mo ago
    We pressure our kids into grit, but genius comes from the inside. Be grateful when it happens, but be happy if it does not.
    - vlovich123 7mo ago
      Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement only reached by much less than 1% of all active players. To me that’s genius level. Also, it’s not necessarily an accident that the youngest is the one to have attained the best result. Evidence is quite clear that older siblings can help their younger ones achieve more faster because the younger ones see it as a path to follow/if they can I can. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf
      - zozbot234 7mo ago
        Yes, but that kind of aristocratic tutoring is not scalable to the bulk of the population. You need the equivalent of deep PhD expertise in every subject to accomplish that, and even AIs are nowhere close to that level.
ferguess_k 7mo ago
I think they deliberately underplayed their role in this. Especially with Asian parents who think such nurturing is part of the "norm". I wouldn't be surprised that they spent TONs of time tutoring him when he was young -- and when he was more or less self-bootstrapped they don't need to spend too much time. But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.
kccqzy 7mo ago
That’s simply not quite true if you read the article. When Terence Tao got stuck on a continued fraction problem, his mother told him to use the quadratic. In contrast when I was a kid and was thinking about optimizing my program to print all prime numbers, my mother, instead of telling me about the sieve of Eratosthenes, told me to do school-approved math instead. Now shoutout to my actual math teacher, who, having been told that I got stuck on writing a program to solve simultaneous linear equations, told me about Gaussian elimination.

hgomersall 7mo ago

In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.

ekjhgkejhgk 7mo ago
> If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? He learned to read and write by himself. I'm pretty sure he would've been fine regardless of shape.
- simsla 7mo ago
  And that's probably the opposite of being school-shaped. School is hellishly boring if you're ahead of the curve.
  - mlrtime 7mo ago
    The pdf linked seems to disagree with your assessment, at least for Tao.
    - agrounds 7mo ago
      Agreed. But generally it very much depends on the school and the effort of those in and around it. Terrence was very fortunate to have parents who supported him and likely lobbied for his unconventional high school/primary school split education, and equally fortunate that his schools were able and willing to accommodate him.
  - kenjackson 7mo ago
    That's a specific school problem. I think being school-shaped is not about being bored, but more about being willing to do tasks on a schedule and can learn a lot of material through a lecture style.
- 7mo ago