> Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only two 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
I think genetics have more to do with this level of achievement than encouragement from an engaged father. Tao has 2 brothers - why aren't they mathematical supergeniuses too? Either he was born with a brain that has extraordinary analytical ability, or he was born with an insane work ethic not commonly associated with young kids. But even then, are there reports of him having to work super hard to understand things? If you can do advanced algebra at age 5, I'd say your brain is something extraordinary. Whether the underlying reason for that extraordinary brain is due to genes or some other trigger, it likely was not mainly due to an "encouraging father", IMO.
The previous sentence from the one you quoted states that
“Tao also has two brothers, who are living in Australia. Both formerly represented the country at the International Mathematical Olympiad”
His (younger) brother, Nigel achieved two bronze medals (placing 132nd and 114th overall) at the age of 15 and 16 [0]. Quite good, specially at a younger age than most participants.
Terence [1] got a gold medal (13th place) right before completing 13 years of age. He achieved a similar feat (28th place) around his 12th birthday and a more humble performance (87th place, but still better than his brother's best) around his 11th birthday. At 11, better than 58% of his competition, some of the best 17 and 18 year olds at competitive math in the world.
He is cited as "the youngest bronze, silver, and gold medalist, respectively, in IMO history." [2]
These are entirely different levels.
[0] https://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=783
[1] https://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=1581
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
He was probably lucky to be the younger brother growing up.
But of course that doesn’t matter. One could equally hypothesize being the oldest allows for most attention from the parents, etc.
But then again, Judit Polgar, by far the strongest chess player among the famous 3 Polgar sisters, was the youngest…
In my opinion, this sort of “human peak” genius performance requires more than small differences in upbringing.
Now, to torture the metaphor, how do I flip on the rest of my switches...
Ask again in 2122.
In the meantime, I guess, we all need to learn that our worth as a person is determined by who we are, not what we are.
Trevor Tao is autistic savant with a double degree in maths and music. He is FIDE International Master in Chess.
Nigel Tao has IQ 180. I think he works with Go language development.
http://math.fau.edu/yiu/Oldwebsites/MPS2010/TerenceTao1984.p...
My favorite part is when he was asked, at age 8 minus epsilon, whether addition distributes over multiplication (after having established that multiplication distributing over addition is an example of a distributive law), and he said, "only for Boolean algebras."
(Disclosure: I was also a child prodigy, so much of this story resonated with me. I'm now a research software engineer at Google, working on lots of mathematically intensive topics in 2D graphics, but obviously nowhere nearly as accomplished as Prof Tao)
At least for me, this also comes with costs. Some of these costs are immediately observable to me (much lower levels of broad-insight / Gordian-Knot-slicing, and I am less patient with others). Other costs are only presumed…I have guesses about associated long-term health risks both direct and indirect.
Anyway, all this to say, I think it can be done artificially. Since these things take time to play out towards mastery, you better hope you can get it right. Just like in software, some things can be a Pareto improvement, but some things can be prematurely optimized, and some things really never needed to be built in the first place.
I agree about inputs. I have a list project I'm working on called "This I Believe". I'm trying to decode my deeply held beliefs so that I understand mself and can change those beliefs. The very first thing I put on it was "Better living through chemistry."
2) Is learning any topic easier for you than for an average person or are you so talented in just a few areas?
300 print "mr. fibonacci is leaving now,"
310 print "and wishes to see you again sometime in the future"
312 print
313 print
315 print "here goes his car!!!!!!!!"
320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"I can't seriously believe the alternative.
Do you have evidence to support these numbers, or the more general claim of genetic supremacy?
Math education comes up here regularly, and we have lots of smart math people here, but the story is often that some commentator was simply never shown anything interesting in their whole schooling. I'd never have given it much thought were it not for one particular math teacher who put a lot of effort into me and a few other interested kids. I still keep in touch with him.
I'll accept that nobody is, but his mom was a math teacher. Few of us get that kind of leg up, certainly not 600m+. When I was 5, "don't get shot" was already getting a significant share of my brain's power, and I had it better than most. Sure, he's got a brain like gasoline, but don't discount the spark and oxygen that allowed the genius to deflagrate. And don't just throw numbers around like that if you don't have proof. If you respect the mathematics, act like it.
But I have a feeling his success as a professional mathematician involves the interaction of such math talent with hard work and good mathematical taste.
One can read his PhD qualifying exams to observe he was actually not an outlier amongst his peers in his early career.
You are providing questions as a substitute for actual evidence. Your questions are worthy of being asked, but they are still questions.
Basically a variant of "I cannot explain ... therefore it must be Y! How could it not be Y?"
Just because people don't have adequate explanations for nurture doesn't make it an automatic "genetics". All it means is that they don't have adequate explanations. This does not make your stance any stronger or more likely to be correct.
(Disclaimer: I can easily believe genetics is the answer. I won't, however, be sure of it).
> Just because people don't have adequate explanations for nurture doesn't make it an automatic "genetics". All it means is that they don't have adequate explanations.
Your question is the equivalent of "Since you cannot provide evidence, I must be right." This is a fallacy. The other party's lack of evidence does not strengthen your position.
Maybe they don't know how to do it. Maybe TT got lucky.
No formal training in math. Made insane contributions to mathematics including solving "unsolvable" problems.
> A child prodigy by age 11, he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who were lodgers at his home. He was later lent a book written by S. L. Loney on advanced trigonometry.[18][19] He mastered this by the age of 13 while discovering sophisticated theorems on his own. By 14, he received merit certificates and academic awards that continued throughout his school career, and he assisted the school in the logistics of assigning its 1,200 students (each with differing needs) to its approximately 35 teachers.[14]: 27 He completed mathematical exams in half the allotted time, and showed a familiarity with geometry and infinite series. Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902; he developed his own method to solve the quartic. In the following year, he tried to solve the quintic, not knowing that it could not be solved by radicals.
If there was a method of raising kids like this "scientifically" , I bet a good portion of the worlds GDP would be put into this field of research
Our genes encode the layout of physical race tracks on which marbles of matter and information travel. Some people's bodies have a bunch of muscle tracks, so as they grow, their body benefits from the activity on those. They grow up to find it easier to gain muscle than other people.
For geniuses, I imagine that the brain is a perfectly laid out super highway. Any information that comes in gets to where it needs to go because there's signs and signals and traffic cops patrolling. If some piece of information can't find where to go, well, damned if we don't have a construction worker and a navigator jumping in the passenger seat with you to help out.
Ultimately, I think the brain is so plastic that each of us can one day decide to elect a new mayor to our body town. The new mayor can decide to tear up roads and fix potholes etc. Yeah, it would have been great if we had founded the town with a plan and hadn't had that college riot but here we are. Time to pave some roads.
Because it kinda puncture this feel good marketing bull that "you can be anything you want". It could also shut endless flowing money into extra-coaching classes outside normal schools which promise to "help child to reach their fullest potential".
If you will be good at baseball if you have A and B, OK with neither, but terrible with only one, those genes will be identified in most studies as having nothing to do with baseball, maybe even identified as harmful.
I can offer a concrete example. Autism is more often found in high-IQ families, but itself is associated with decreased IQ. That suggests one case where either A and B alone are harmful, having neither makes you fine (and unlikely to bear children with A or B), and having both makes you smart.
I am not sure if we want people to figure out how to make connections involving specific genes, because a lot of us benefit from living in a world where we can game LeetCode by working longer and harder in a way that's unrelated to what Google is looking for.
This dynamic matches what we see in the case of Terrence Tao and his brothers, the Polgar sisters, and other cases of savants/virtuosos that come to mind. Usually one child has extraordinary ability while their siblings are much less remarkable. If the environmental model were accurate, we should see many cases where families produce more than one extreme talent of equal skill. But we don't see that in practice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygene#Trait_distribution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#His...