Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/1984-clements.pdf

by gurjeet • 5 months ago

482 326 5 months ago

gwern.net

canadiantim2• 5 months ago

Interesting it's hosted on gwern...

poidos• 5 months ago

Gwern hosts a lot of PDFs -- see https://gwern.net/archiving

canadiantim2• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

My brain initially parsed the title as an obituary title and I was really sad for a moment.

markisus• 5 months ago

This 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• 5 months ago

Had me in tears by the end. One of my favorite books. So glad a friend recommended it to me.

riffraff2• 5 months ago

I 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.

LostMyLogin• 5 months ago

We had to read it in middle school and man did it have me in tears at the end.

nephihaha5• 5 months ago

Good book, but the film is underwhelming. Saw it fairly recently for the first time.

jibal• 5 months ago

Humbling.

markus_zhang8• 5 months ago

Indeed. He definitely knows more Math than I do.

chao-• 5 months ago

This 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

I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.

karmakurtisaani• 5 months ago

And imagine what he could have done if he had done something useful at such a young age!

piekvorst• 5 months ago

Knowing 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• 5 months ago

Learning three languages at an early age is completely unremarkable for millions of people around the world. It's just notable which ones his were.

lordnacho2• 5 months ago

It'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.

zoeysmithe• 5 months ago

I learned two languages growing up and was speaking both as soon as I could speak and could write in both not long after. This is typical for nearly every kid in the world outside of countries with strong language monocultures. I certainly think Mills was a very talented person, but there's this weird cult of being impressed by "speaks 7 languages" hagoigraphies which aren't helpful. People bring up it as some acid test of intelligence and its just not very accurate.

Especially when you actually know the language these kinds of people claim to speak and you realize they actually don't speak 7 languages but maybe know 2 or 3 fluently and know 'kitchen' versions of all the others. I'm not going to name names because I don't want an argument and don't have the spoons for it, but lots of these international luminaries and leaders and such with "speaks 7 language" are often little more than conmen or simply enjoy building their own little hagiographies for their own PR goals.

There's this wonderful deep-dive on youtube on Feynman's high-questionable personal mythology that is a great example of this kind of self-promotion and how easy it is to sell one's self, especially in academic and techie circles, if you have a certain amount of charisma and drive.

Also as a lefty, I'm also not impressed by breathless ambidextrous tales either as most lefties are forced to be ambidextrous and its not actually exceptional at all. I can write with both hands, play musical instruments either way, play sports either way, etc. The left hand is better at these things, but my right-hand is okay-ish at almost all these things and I use a right-hand dominant near everything in my life anyway. I even like to switch it up to keep wear and tear down. At work the mouse is on the left, but at home for gaming its on the right. This is all boring everyday stuff for lefties.

There's a toxic 'great man' mythology that humanity still can't get over and its weird seeing it taken seriously when so many 'great men' have been debunked or seen as recipients of the system they were under (Mills' father pushing him so hard and being in the privileged class that would allow all this instead of back-breaking farm labor all day). Personal talent is important but its vastly played up in dishonest ways for dishonest gains. We probably pass many highly talented people a day on the street, but only some had the opportunity to grow those gifts into something they can use.

The famous quote comes to mind. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

xamuel• 5 months ago

J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather, it was his father who pushed him to all those accomplishments. His father sheltered him from other kids so he was not aware that his accomplishments were unusual!

_s_a_m_• 5 months ago

Didnt he went through a major burnout and depression because of that? I remember reading something like that.

FL33TW00D• 5 months ago

This was mostly down to enormous pressure from his father, causing him to have a breakdown in his early twenties.

Not to say the results weren't incredible, but certainly required sacrifice.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm#li...

stevoski• 5 months ago

My daughter spoke four languages at age 3. Not because she is gifted, but because she grew up in an immigrant environment. One language with me, another with my partner who speaks a different mother tongue than I do, and the two local languages where we live.

And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.

When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.

She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.

exceptione• 5 months ago

Latin and Greek are classical, 'dead' languages.

Sharlin2• 5 months ago

Learning by immersion is a completely different process from learning by being tutored, never mind learning by oneself from books.

nephihaha5• 5 months ago

Unusual to study Latin before Greek. It's usually the other way round.

vixen99• 5 months ago

Tangential but am reminded of Churchill's comments" "And when in after years my school-fellows who had won prizes and distinction for writing such beautiful Latin poetry and pithy Greek epigrams had to come down again to common English, to earn their living or make their way, I did not feel myself at any disadvantage." and

"“However, by being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell—a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great—was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis."

Even better if you can do both!

vbezhenar• 5 months ago

I learned to read at age three or four, I think and I consumed every book I could find, including various math books, old chemistry books, etc. I didn't really understand anything there, but it was just fascinating to me to even touch that knowledge. So I'm a bit skeptic about these stories of children studying Plato.

mkoubaa• 5 months ago

Talk to an average college freshman that studies plato and you might be similarly disappointed

ooloncoloophid• 5 months ago

His book 'On Liberty' is the subject of a recent In Our Time episode (BBC Radio Four series on the history of ideas) [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002pqnc]. They discuss his childhood and his (apparently very warm) relationship with his father. (Sidenote: first proper In Our Time episode with the new host; he seems fine, but I miss Melvyn Bragg.)

TheChaplain• 5 months ago

I am interested in his new book, "Six Math Essentials", but I doubt it will be on my very low level of math understanding..

creamyhorror• 5 months ago

Incredible. 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• 5 months ago

Curious. 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• 5 months ago

I could have been just like him if I tried hard enough.

suprjami• 5 months ago

At 8 years old I was able to expertly dismantle many radios.

Was still a few years away from reassembly.

nananana92• 5 months ago

At 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.

jdthedisciple3• 5 months ago

Makes total sense, it used to be called "Recycle Bin" after all!

geoffbp• 5 months ago

Worked ok til it was a system dir and the system wouldn’t boot anymore? :)

energy123• 5 months ago

I deleted the files from there to free up disk space

desertrider12• 5 months ago

That’s funny. When I was little I found “format” in my mp3 player’s settings. Thought it would customize the UI or something, but instead I ended up with no music for the rest of the road trip.

nephihaha5• 5 months ago

I was doing that at three or four and was reminded of it constantly for the next ten years or more. (I actually raised the subject on my mother's death bed.)

fuzzfactor12• 5 months ago

When I was a boy all we had were high-voltage vacuum tube electronics, it was fun.

svat2• 5 months ago

Don'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!)"

nananana92• 5 months ago

This does feel like something a super smart alien pretending to be an 8 year old would write.

whatshisface• 5 months ago

Sometimes I wonder if HNers have met more aliens than 8 year olds.

dfex• 5 months ago

That 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• 5 months ago

Found myself counting characters in case there was an easter egg in there. Spoiler: there isn't an easter egg in there.

svat2• 5 months ago

The whole program is an Easter egg :) “sorry, he wasn’t born yet! try again” vs “no, he is already in heaven, try again”, and that cute goodbye routine.

aurareturn2• 5 months ago

I 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.

jama21118• 5 months ago

Not 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?

jonahx4• 5 months 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.

aurareturn2• 5 months 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, but what kid had that level of motivation?

There is no way this is true. I've met and worked with enough people to know that not everyone has the same mental ability. There are some exceptionally sharp people and many dim witted ones too.

bendbro• 5 months ago

I take it you've never met another human before

weatherlite5• 5 months ago

No .. not really. Not even close. Just like even if I practiced music 8 hours a day I wouldn't be able to come up with the music Kurt Cobain has or Mozart. There are plenty of musicians who try really hard but lack the innate talent - at best they can learn to play other people's music but never can come up with good original music, at least not something other people want to hear.

As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing

qsera• 5 months ago

I think it has to be both. You need some ability to understand and thus find happiness in the thing that you are reading which leads to the motivation.

mmooss5• 5 months ago

Another requirement is the emotional capacity at 8 years old to focus, feel confident, and feel safe.

I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family.

I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.

alisonkisk3• 5 months ago

There are probably hundreds of people on this site who had the same enthusiasm for math and time dedication as Terence Tao, but lacked his extreme outlier fluid intelligence, processing speed, perfect memory, and even handwriting talent(!). Terence Tao mastered calculus at an age when most future-mathemician geniuses weren't yet strong readers of chapter books.

cm2012• 5 months ago

There is a massive body of research showing this is not true

apt-apt-apt-apt2• 5 months ago

The important factors seem to be intrinsic motivation and other good mental faculties like great memory for concepts and formulas, understanding.

It's hard to say whether the motivation came from the good skills (understanding, memory) e.g. "I'm good at this, I like it!", or that the good skills came from the motivation. I believe both are important though, and that they are intertwined.

markus_zhang8• 5 months ago

I actually agree with you on the first part, that is his super power is more on that persistence. But I’m not sure about the second part.

indy• 5 months ago

Careful, we live in a society which has taken a side in the nature vs. nurture debate and if you're deemed to be on the wrong side of that then you'll be accused of being a nazi

baxtr• 5 months ago

Interesting thought experiment.

The question is: what do we want to optimize for?

Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?

I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.

keiferski4• 5 months ago

Sure. But it doesn’t really seem clear to me that selecting for intelligence actually results in a better world. It’s a fallacy to think that intelligence = more rational or immune to human flaws, as a cursory glance at any “intelligent” social group should make obvious.

I think we’d be better off optimizing for conscientiousness or empathy, frankly. Even a world run by gardeners would probably be more beautiful and meaningful than one run by math geniuses.

riffraff2• 5 months ago

it's been a while, but I think mentats in Dune are trained not bred. Also, they use mind enhancing drugs (sapho juice IIRC). Which I guess makes a interesting point too, though different from yours :D

(I do agree biological intelligence is not close to its peak)

Simon321• 5 months ago

Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics.

This is a real possibility in our lifetimes due to AI.

Jolter2• 5 months ago

Strictly speaking, evolution selects for viable offspring, not simply surviving. But that’s a nitpick, quite beside your point.

SirHumphrey• 5 months ago

There is a slightly unexplored tangent in Brave New World about an experiment on Cyprus, where a society of humans bread to be intelligent descended in to civil war because nobody wanted to do menial work.

lupire5• 5 months ago

This is the theory of Elite Overproduction

illuminator83• 5 months ago

Intelligent people tend to reproduce a lot less than other people. You wanna be average (or slightly above) for the best chance at successful procreation. And hyper-intelligent people are especially bad at procreation.

PaulHoule2• 5 months ago

Physics is not stuck because we don't have smart theoreticians who have good ideas: it is stuck because we don't have big enough particle accelerators and detectors to distinguish correct from incorrect theories.

jama21118• 5 months ago

Wow, incredible read! Amazing what motivated peple (and children!) can achieve.

quietthrow• 5 months ago

Genuine 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• 5 months ago

It depends on how much value their talents can bring to humankind, I guess.

fuzzfactor12• 5 months ago

Very good guess, right on the money

Too bad humankind is almost never paying attention.

jdthedisciple3• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

There 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.

sleepyams• 5 months ago

I think Terrence Tao makes at least 600k at UCLA. Not too bad if you ask me.

squigz• 5 months ago

I wonder how Tao - or a supermodel - might feel about the idea that they don't have to work for their "gifts"

defrost6• 5 months ago

Not a mystery, Tao has written about how, child prodigy aside, he has to work at math on a regular basis with grit and perseverance.

rkomorn3• 5 months ago

There are people wired like Tao (or superstar athletes, supermodels, or other remarkable people) that don't achieve the same results.

Even among the people who have similar "luck" in that respect, some still stand out. The people we think of as elite performers aren't just elite relative to the 99% of us. They're also elite within the top 1% that makes up their field: they're dominant even among the people who should be their peers.

weatherlite5• 5 months ago

There are very very few people wired like Tao; how many child prodigies like that are there ? He seems to be one in a million but its pretty much impossible to assess IQ at those levels. Sure, it's not enough. YOu need the obsession for math, but lets not trivialize his intellectual ability - he's definitely not only top 1% that would just put him in the smartest 2-3 kids in his class. No, he was probably among the smartest 10-20 kids of his age group in the whole United States.

DeathArrow• 5 months ago

The two types of talents can be judged by the impact they have. A scientific gifted individual can produce value while a good looking individual has mostly entertainment value.

That being said, supermodels are more famous, have a much larger following and earn much more money than math geniuses. That says we, humans, care more about entertainment than value.

fuzzfactor12• 5 months ago

A scientific gifted individual can produce value

They can also produce a lot of damage unless they refrain to an extent.

LudwigNagasena• 5 months ago

Why for you is innate grit any more commendable than innate intelligence?

rhubarbtree• 5 months ago

Can’t speak for others but I think I learnt grit. Didn’t really show it very young but by 16 I was just able to grind through anything.

weatherlite5• 5 months ago

Genuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment?

It's complex; first of all society has an interest for exceptional people to be respected and well compensated; if there was absolutely no prestige or compensation in being a math genius it's quite possible Terrence Tao would have become a schoolteacher. So a well functioning capitalist society has both monetary and prestige tools to incentivize extreme accomplishment.

Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy. Admiring figures for their looks, charisma or intellectual accomplishments could very will be in our wiring - 20 thousand years ago we would admire the shaman, the great hunter or the storyteller.

But ultimately I totally agree with you - not only were these people born into the unique genetic and envrionmental circumstances that made the accomplishment possible , I also don't believe they had any say after being born in becoming what they had become; e.g I don't believe there's a "free will" and that Terrence Tao "chose" to become a math genius. He was born into that reality in a fluke.

317070• 5 months ago

Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy.

I just want to point out that this is most likely not true, and that this is cultural. The long argument you can find in the book "The Dawn of Everything".

In short, when the West came into contact with other civilizations, one of the most striking features of our culture from their point of view was how hierarchical we are.

krzat• 5 months ago

Do you celebrate people who persevere despite despite their hardships?

Ability to persevere is also wired in.

If you pull this thread to it's conclusion, then nothing is worth celebrating. Just law of physics doing their thing.

fuzzfactor12• 5 months ago

I like a massive head start.

There may not be many other things which can contribute the same advantage.

jacquesm2• 5 months ago

Roughly for the same reason that we put Olympians on a pedestal. Sure, there is a lot of grit involved. But it starts off with good genes and while you won't find anybody that didn't put in the work you also won't find people with bad genes because they will never make it to the entry point, and even if somehow magically they did they'd never stand a chance.

Case in point, that dance...

Society rewards 'good genes'. Which is interesting because it is effectively the club of good genes rewarding themselves by co-opting the ones without, either by amassing actual gold or by amassing gold medals. And we all let them because we recognize that they really do have good genes and they put in the hard work.

The problems arrive when the ones that are good at amassing actual gold and that are intelligent do not have a similar endowment in the ethics department. And weirdly enough we don't have a backstop for that unless they act in a limited number of ways that we consider 'criminal', usually reserved for the ones with 'bad genes'. So as long as they stay away from those we just look at the grit and the money and go 'that's ok then'.

And if you have amassed enough shiny rocks even those criminal laws seems to no longer matter and you can do whatever the hell you want and expect to get away with it.

jatari• 5 months ago

Real answer, none of us can do anything more than what you are given by your parents. You get the brain you get and that's it. You can either work hard and improve and become a genius or you become a drug addict and die in a gutter. Determinism and the laws of physics rules us all.

We might as well chose to praise those of us who were gifted with abilities that we aspire to.

impossiblefork5• 5 months ago

I 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.

alisonkisk3• 5 months ago

I didn't see that in the document. What page is it on?

OJFord• 5 months ago

I 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.

impossiblefork5• 5 months ago

The questions are on page 215 (3/26) and Tao's answers are on the next page.

andyferris• 5 months ago

Actually - do they do this in LLM benchmarks? As a measure of overconfidence/confabulation? Seems immediately applicable.

impossiblefork5• 5 months ago

I 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.

lupire5• 5 months ago

"incomplete information" is a standard concept in word problem curriculum. But usually it's explicitly an option in the test, as a fairness to the student.

Making mistakes in lecture is a standard technique used by good teachers, to promote active listening and critical thinking.

impossiblefork5• 5 months ago

Yes, but in Swedish school maths books there are lists of problems, and these are always correct. You don't find a "this problem is nonsense, and here's way" in the list of solutions.

I think this kind of thing is extremely unusual.

Jun8• 5 months ago

I 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.

mmooss5• 5 months ago

How 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• 5 months ago

Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.

Yes, let's give them only the blandest, most boring interactions possible.

Darkstryder• 5 months ago

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• 5 months 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• 5 months 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!

matsemann• 5 months ago

and later on won the Putnam one year

Just the once, though, huh? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079

hnfong4• 5 months 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.

ferguess_k• 5 months 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.

kccqzy2• 5 months 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• 5 months 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.

ekjhgkejhgk5• 5 months 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.

sfn422• 5 months ago

Where I grew up there wasn't any way to deal with those of us who did better. If you did worse there were all sorts of programs, they would move you to a separate small class so you could get extra help and stuff like that.

My problem was everything was too easy. I was bored. I would get reprimanded for not working because they gave us an hour worth of work, I finished it in 10 minutes and then did other stuff. I basically didn't have to study for anything, I just showed up and got Bs. If I put in 10% effort I got As. And all I ever got for it was yelled at for having done everything they asked me to do too fast.

So I started sitting in the back of the classroom minding my own business and trying not to be noticed. I'm convinced my life would have been very different if I hadn't been completely jaded from most of my teachers basically punishing me for being better than the rest. By my mid teens I didn't give a shit, I was happy coasting along doing better than the rest just by showing up.

My choices were my own and I'm doing pretty well now. Got my shit together in my late 20s and got a CS degree. Best decision I ever made. But I can't help but think I could have ended up on a path like this much earlier if my teachers actually supported me rather than treating me like a problem.

PaulHoule2• 5 months ago

There is the ideal of school and then there is school.

I was very 'school-shaped' if by school you mean I could sit quietly and read books and solve problems. More school-shaped than the other kids.

If by school you mean that bullies don't find you interesting, that nobody threatens to kill you, then I was not 'school-shaped' at all.

I was really excited to go to school on day one, within a year it tuned very bad and I wish, retrospectively, I'd had the courage to stay home.

MaintenanceMode• 5 months ago

He’s on Star Talk this week. https://overcast.fm/+AAzXlUoaiV0

arjie• 5 months ago

How 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.

Jolter2• 5 months ago

In 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.

mmooss5• 5 months ago

I 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.

alisonkisk3• 5 months ago

He was 7 years old, so it was impossible for him to give consent for anything. His parents gave consent on his behalf.

mmooss5• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

Fascinating 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• 5 months ago

This 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?

fuzzfactor12• 5 months ago

Could be something even more difficult to identify that keeps everyone else from doing it.

Markoff• 5 months ago

Terence 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...

defrost6• 5 months ago

The HN mods apparently have a sign in the HN control room

  It's been [ ] days since the last Terrence Tao submission

arrowsmith• 5 months ago

For a split second I read this headline as "Terence Tao dead at … years old" and was shocked

alkonaut• 5 months ago

Proving, 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• 5 months ago

Especially interesting since intelligence is much more environmental than most people assume: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-n...

small_model• 5 months ago

When will a SOTA model beat the best mathematician on earth? Similar to Chess and Go examples. It has to be getting close.

throwawayk7h• 5 months ago

What's his secret to eternal youth? He's 50 now but he still looks 25.

ekjhgkejhgk5• 5 months ago

Asian.

apt-apt-apt-apt2• 5 months ago

He looks around his age to me, were you looking at old pics?

keiferski4• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

I 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.

keiferski4• 5 months ago

I 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.

lordnacho2• 5 months ago

I wonder if you could test this. Maybe someone has a longitudinal study where they check what people thought they liked to do as kids against what they do as adults.

albertzeyer• 5 months ago

I wonder a bit about that. What activities or possibilities are you exposed at during that age.

I know many computer science colleagues who were not exposed to programming during that age and only later came to it.

I feel kind of lucky that somewhat randomly I stumbled into computer programming (because XtreeGold could show the content of files, and I was learning to understand BAT-files by looking into them) during that age, and that's what I do now.

There are probably a lot of things you were not exposed during that age, that could have been the perfect match.

There are also lots of kids who just play games, or video games, do sports, watch films or so during that age, without really being exposed to any "potential useful" activities. Some parents would maybe even say that this is how it should be.

As a parent, I guess a good advice would be to try to expose your child to as much things as possible, without forcing it to do anything of course.

keiferski4• 5 months ago

Murch actually expands on that a little more in the interview. He doesn't mean the specific activity is what your job should be, it's more like "the basic similar activity."

So for him, as a video editor, it was using a tape recorder to record sounds, and reorganize them in an aesthetically appealing way. He didn't actually get into video editing specifically until after college IIRC.

noisy_boy• 5 months ago

I first touched a computer after completing my university degree and I still remember the happiness I felt by simply running a DOS command and seeing the expected output.

It does't matter when the plug finds the socket - it is always electric.

gigatexal• 5 months ago

Well 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• 5 months ago

Fun read. Math makes so much intuitive sense in his head.

xyzsparetimexyz• 5 months ago

Okay, so? Has any of this research been used for anything? Or is it all nerd snipe set theory nonsense?

wanderlust123• 5 months ago

Honestly 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• 5 months ago

Well its not nonsense, and its very interesting, but its just a certain formulation of logic in the end, nothing more or less.

graphcolorer• 5 months ago

I 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.

ekjhgkejhgk5• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

Australia

piker• 5 months ago

Presumably Australia where he’s from, but also possible in the U.S.

defrost6• 5 months ago

As 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.

ekjhgkejhgk5• 5 months ago

Do 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.

thiago_fm• 5 months ago

He 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• 5 months ago

I watched a video of Terrance Tao - 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.

gverrilla• 5 months ago

Terence tends to read whole books rather than parts of books.

Funny remark.

meffmadd• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

I 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.

drited4• 5 months ago

Cultivating 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• 5 months ago

The music in that game is sublime

qmr• 5 months ago

Hey 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.

drited4• 5 months ago

We haven't tried Dragon Box. Thank you for the recommendation, we will check it out

goolz• 5 months ago

This 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• 5 months ago

One of the most fascinating and moving writings I've read in my life.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 months ago

I'd love to know what his true introduction to mathematics was. What books, etc. What created that spark and interest.

lich_king• 5 months ago

Since 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.

zozbot2348• 5 months ago

These 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• 5 months ago

Exactly! 12 years of 'knowledge' half of it useless, the other half could be taught in 3 years--if done properly.

Viliam12344• 5 months ago

I think it does provide some education for the average child. It's just when you are not average that it fails you.

meroes• 5 months ago

I think a big one you didn’t touch on is being told you do well in school because you are smart, not because you put in the effort.

It’s a lie many start believing, that they don’t put in effort.

tarentel• 5 months ago

Not sure that's true. I am by no means gifted in the sense of Terence Tao, or even people much more gifted than me but far less gifted than him, but I did well in school up to a certain point in college. I never really learned how to study until I got fairly far in my education process. I put very little effort into school up until that point. That's when I actually had to put effort in and it was quite a wake up call.

The_Blade• 5 months ago

I finished my assignment in advanced 8th grade Math real quick, busted out MAD Magazine. Relatively quickly it was taken by Mr. P-------. Not missing a beat, aloud in class I said, "thanks a lot... asshole."

I got suspended for three days, and also the enmity of his best friend the advanced social studies teacher. Yet, somehow I didn't get kicked off the basketball team. And I actually got a girlfriend, who punched me at the wrestling match, then we kissed behind the school during the dance.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.

runjake• 5 months ago

My experience was very similar to yours. I was definitely not prodigious. I was slightly gifted, for the most part, and exceptionally gifted in other non-notable ways.

I think one thing that hurt me, in particular, is that I repeatedly got told "you're really going to go places some day!". And, so I waited for things to happen.

It took me way too long to realize I had to make things happen.

If you're reading this and you're young and gifted, you need to make things happen. You'll have people help you along the way, but odds are, you will never be discovered and have riches lavished upon you.

gaoshan• 5 months ago

This comment really resonates with me (I’m old now, for context). I was put in the gifted program, but the truth is I wasn’t very good at math while I was wildly strong in language. I was a pretty solitary kid who read a lot of quality literature and was endlessly curious about the world. I ended up getting kicked out of the program early in elementary school for being "immature," but the gifted label stuck and I kept hearing how smart I was.

By high school, I was a 1.4 GPA student who was also on the Academic Decathlon team winning state-level medals. My upbringing was extremely abusive, which definitely contributed to the academic problems, but what I really needed was someone in my corner pushing me to explore and actually try. Being told I was smart wasn’t just useless, it was actively harmful. I became afraid to try and leaned on what came naturally (hence doing well on Decathlon tests) while consistently failing to finish things (no homework, no papers... and the GPA shows it).

What would have made a huge difference for me was being explicitly taught how and why to study, how to take and review notes, and how to manage my time. And just as importantly, someone consistently emphasizing that effort matters a lot more than being "smart."

Even now, I’m honestly surprised by how many people I work with in tech equate being "smart" with being good at math, algorithms, or pattern recognition, while seeming almost oblivious to some pretty big gaps in other areas. That mindset isn’t doing anyone any favors.

gwern3• 5 months ago

I'd note that there are many studies showing that the usual outcomes for gifted kids are not all that great.

No, there's not, and they do do great. And this goes back to Terman: there's a handful of highly selected examples (eg the Australian kids recruited from child psychologist referrals, the self-selected self-diagnosed Mensa adult survey), furious anecdotes, and then every systematic prospective sample like Terman or population registers or SMPY shows the opposite.

And while Tao is, of course, exceptional, the results for accelerated gifted kids are generally great. And Tao was part of SMPY (note the URL path, supporting documentation for https://gwern.net/smpy ) and helped demonstrate this in practice.

drited4• 5 months ago

Gwern on that smpy site what does the O-like character next to certainty: log mean?

I'm viewing on chrome from an Android device.

I'm trying to figure out what your certainty on smpy is.

Also thank you for your site. I read your n back analysis some years ago and found it to be very interesting.

TZubiri• 5 months ago

A trick I learned is to respond "Oh, ok", at a certain point.

Debating something is, as my grandmother said "the ultimate concession", you only ever really debate something if you feel that there is a chance you are wrong. If there is an impasse, and you are confident in your response, there is usually no reason to continue, especially when there's a teacher-student asymmetry, they take it personal, and you gain nothing but make an enemy out of your teacher and spend your "question" points.

There's only so many times you can interrupt a professor, and spending your question points on correcting them isn't very useful to a student. And that the student believe that on one ocassion they know more than the professor, does not mean that there is nothing to learn from the professor.

Both of these mistakes (overextending a challenge and conflating a specific dominance over a general dominance) I think often come together under a personality trait that is generally identified as "arrogance". I do think there's a middle ground between believing one is superior and dropping all contentions of giftedness, but it's a thin line, and I think it's especially notable when the difference in talents (between the student and teacher, or between the gifted child and the average) is very marginal anyway, if it's undisputable then most tensions dissipate with the clarity.

conformist• 5 months ago

I was in a similar situation as the parent post and skipped/was moved up by two years of high school.

I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is something parents and schools should take seriously.

(Tbf I was also super lucky to find a very accepting group of nerdy friends in the new year that would tolerate someone younger.)

marttt• 5 months ago

Nils M. Holm's essays about highly intelligent people and IQ are worth a read here -- "Where Do The Failed 0.1% Go?" [1] and others [2].

1: https://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf (on HN 2015, 170 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145853)

2: https://t3x.org/#essays

fouc• 5 months ago

let alone corrected them

oof, I felt this one.

jmt710• 5 months ago

I had a child prodigy friend growing up. He had graduated college before most of us were in highschool. Long story short, he turned to a life of crime, stole millions of dollars from high tech companies and ended up killing himself in a plane crash. It's hard out there for the super smart.

hirvi745• 5 months ago

I 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.

markus_zhang8• 5 months ago

I’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.

ekjhgkejhgk5• 5 months ago

Phew 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_zhang8• 5 months ago

I 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.

ryanjshaw• 5 months ago

I’ve settled on the idea that my job as parent is to introduce my kid to a bunch of different things, help them process that information, but ultimately the decision of where they choose to focus their energy is up to them. I’m proud of whatever they do, as long as they try their best.

markus_zhang8• 5 months ago

That’s a good choice. I just feel each kid has so much potentials in them, but there are always something, like a shortcoming in the genes or a bad characteristics that prevents them from achieving a lot more.

And I don’t have the time, will and experience to guide mine.

drivebyhooting2• 5 months ago

I 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_2• 5 months 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.

drivebyhooting2• 5 months ago

You _guess_. It’s quite acceptable, but still learning from watching Sesame Street?

kccqzy2• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

Loved 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• 5 months ago

Question: 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• 5 months ago

The 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.

Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

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