Q: Prodigy Teen's Works

[Jinx]

Does anyone know the facts about the following matter? It is not my intent here to deny these children the credit and recognition they receive, but I need to ask: Recently, I read about prodigy teens (est. 17 year olds) working on various complicated math and science solutions...most of which is all theory. Some has no practical application at present. Who checks their work to make sure they aren't misapplying what they believe they know?

For example, in math, one can misapply the same formula, or set of formulas, consistently and develop a bogus solution set steering the prodigy teen away from the correct solution set. Articles on these teens never fully address this, but sometimes, I see a blurb about minimal mentoring beyond the high school level, in some cases. The key word, though, is "minimal". Can they do it correctly, alone?

Some of these topics require such a large amount of requisite knowledge, it really makes me wonder. - Jinx