Terry Tao about his own childhood as child prodigy (1985, at ten)

http://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/terrys-my-recollections.doc

by zjj • 17 years ago

13 24 17 years ago

terrytao.files.wordpress.com

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

This is a link to a Word document. WTF? Do people still write those things?

catch23• 17 years ago

apparently mathematicians use them. extremely smart ones.

zackattack3• 17 years ago

On a tangent, bragging about intelligence you can't apply is like bragging about a car you can't drive. So you see, can't overvalue innate intelligence. Although it may just be a sign that he has no reason to be in touch with today's trends.

Tichy• 17 years ago

And here I thought that LaTEX is the standard for mathematicians.

mcav• 17 years ago

The article in text format (rather than MS Word):

http://gist.github.com/raw/190081/6731e974f7175b26e351b40dff...

mike463• 17 years ago

It's absolutely true -- the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to someone else. You must get organized and this focuses you.

DarkShikari3• 17 years ago

Speaking of child prodigies--I've noticed something extremely odd about childhood ability in my own experiences.

I got a 5 on the Calculus AB AP exam when I was ~10 years old and around the same time got a ~1490 (I don't remember exactly) on the SAT. 6 years later, I did no better on the SAT than I did when I was a preteen and I didn't feel as if I was any better at math than I had been 6 years earlier.

Despite the fact that I had done so well at math as a child, I was never competitive in the higher-level math competitions like the AMC and AIME, where I consistently scored mediocre (~110 on the AMC, ~0-1 on the AIME). I went to school with plenty of classmates who scored near-perfect on both competitions and yet had not been nearly as much of a supposed "prodigy" as I was.

Today, I doubt I am even above average at my college; I am relieved to have simply passed the math courses required for my major with barely-tolerable grades. And yet whenever I read stories of "real" prodigies, I never see anything like this--they always seem to continue their trend and prove to be brilliant mathematicians. Or is this selection bias?

I still don't fully understand what happened. Does mathematical ability plateau at an early age? Is there something special about courses beyond basic calculus that are inherently more difficult? Did my skill simply stop developing because I lost interest?

nl3• 17 years ago

" And yet whenever I read stories of "real" prodigies, I never see anything like this--they always seem to continue their trend and prove to be brilliant mathematicians."

No, it's very, very rare that child prodigies go on to have significant impact in the field they were brilliant at as a child.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_of_Mathematically_Precoci... for some details. (I read a very interesting article about Tao previously which addressed this - trying to find it now)

nl3• 17 years ago

Hmm. Reading the papers from that study group seems to prove me 100% wrong. I suspect my selective referencing skills need improving.

zackattack3• 17 years ago

Your skill stopped developing because you lost interest. Courses beyond basic calculus are not inherently more difficult. They are only more intimidating, and perhaps require a little bit more study time, and spaced repetition. There are more rules, problem types, and proof techniques to remember. If you can do logic, you can do college-level advanced mathematics.

Speaking from personal experience, everyone I went to grade school with who showed exceptional mathematical promise was bested by me in college. Indeed, one of my friends who was put in the "slow" math section is now a math major. Math is doable, and simply becomes something that you have to study for; you no longer get a freebie because you're smart.

DarkShikari3• 17 years ago

Math is doable, and simply becomes something that you have to study for; you no longer get a freebie because you're smart.

I found it was the exact reverse. Many concepts, in my experience, could not be learned well how hard I studied. And yet people who did significantly less work than I did found them extremely easy. One example is natural deduction proofs; I slogged my way through them with extreme difficulty while some friends of mine did them nearly effortlessly by comparison.

Overall, at least my own experience suggests that studying and hard work can never fully replace innate ability.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

Interesting.

I absolutely suck at math, and I blame the computer. Here's why :) :

When I was a kid I was good at 'arithmetic' in school (grade school, I really wouldn't call it math). Anything up to say raising stuff to arbitrary powers and doing lots of multiplications, long division up to fairly high numbers without pencil and paper.

Then high school came along. In the first year I was probably the best of all the kids at math, it didn't cost me any effort either, trigonometry and so on was a breeze. I liked doing it, the teacher was great. Then in the second year of high school we got a fairly lousy teacher (sorry, it's the truth, especially when compared to the guy from the first year), and I got access to a computer.

That changed everything. Computers were so much more fun than math yet somehow related that my interest in mathematics dropped like a stone and my interest in computers went through the roof. After that mathematics never managed to wrest my attention away from coding long enough to make it count.

Even today I have an almost untouched calculus course sitting on my bookshelves that I've been planning to work my way through 'one of these days' for the last decade or so.

Programming is just too much fun.

I know I'd be a better programmer though, with more math under my belt, so maybe, one of these days...

jibiki• 17 years ago

There is a famous story about this: Wunderkind, by Carson McCullers. (You can find it online if you search around.)

Terry Tao about his own childhood as child prodigy (1985, at ten)

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