From Alabama, I think. About ten years ago. He has a younger sister who is also extremely bright. His parents were hoping to get him on TV as the host of a game show, but I guess that never happened.
What do you do with a ten-year-old college graduate? What happened to him?
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: Oh good grief, there is the proper use for a genius!:rolleyes:
Anyway, I am going to guess that a couple of years after graduating he discovered girls.
I knew a similar prodigy a few years back. She started taking college classes at around age 7, and was still taking classes at age 19. Her plan was to get bachelor degrees in everything under the Sun, in the hopes that broad interdisciplinary knowledge would lead to great insights missed by specialists. Her specialty was mostly math, though.
His dream was to host a television show and they were trying to help him pursue his dreams. It didn’t work out…as I suspect they knew would happen. I remember a special on the kid saying that “adults did not like being told they were incorrect by a child.”
I have heard that many super intelligent kids have a bit of a challenge when they get older, as the gap closes between them and their peers.
From what I remember, he explained how he was going to tell contestants that they had lost: he’d say, “Ohhhh, you were SO close!” It was pretty obnoxious… just the way a ten-year-old can be. And that was the thing: aside from his capacity for book learning, he appeared to be a perfectly ordinary ten-year-old boy. His maturity level was right where you would expect a boy his age to be.
I just wondered if he’s spent the last ten years inventing things or getting into trouble or what.
I also want a whatever-happened-background on that British 2-year old, estimated to have the highest IQ measured (for a 2-year old??) However, her life’s ambition is a non-starter. When asked what she wanted to become, she answered “muh-meyd.”
When the OP talked about the kid wanting to be a game show host, for a second I thought he was talking about a child prodigy who appeared on intervention. He graduated with a degree in chemistry at age 13 or something, then wanted to do a career in show business. He ended up a gambling addict and I think hundreds of grand in the hole. Poor kid.
I’ve heard most child prodigies end up leading fairly unremarkable lives (Malcolm Gladwell talks about this a bit in outliers, how an IQ of 130 or higher is what is important, the discrepancy between 130 and 190 is not that great when it comes to life success, etc).
FYI, here’s a Wikipedia list of prodigies, giving some idea of what happened to them. Some became productive adults. On the other hand, Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy.
Is this him? Michael Kearney - Wikipedia
He sounds like he grew into an awesome person. From Inner Stickler’s link:
That’s pretty much the secret of life, right there. Genius, indeed.
Most reputable colleges in the U.S. including the best ones have strict prohibitions about admitting child prodigies into their schools ahead of their time. There are some unusually talented young people but their development overall doesn’t usually match that. It takes time and experience to become well-rounded even in academic subfields as a prodigy let alone for the person as a whole.
Kids like that almost always have demanding parents who are pushing their child in the same way that beauty pageant parents are pushing theirs. It doesn’t often work out well based on an IQ or academic prowess alone. Colleges and universities that admit them are usually less regarded schools who do it as a publicity measure or they are a state school that admits them based on technical criteria alone.
Very rarely, you will get a young child like Taylor Wilson from Texarkana, Arkansas who was born a scientist and does it on his own. He had actual scientific achievements at a young age including ones like being one of the few people in the world to create nuclear fusion. He did it in a home lab at the youngest age ever by far because he understood the theory better than most scientists working in the field. He will surely be best one of the nuclear scientists ever just based on his raw skills and passion for it. That is Einstein level however and most of them don’t fall into the same category.
Th others tend to have just really good intellectual skills but no concrete achievements to show for it and that won’t take you very far in the adult world.
That’s him! Wow. I hope he’s happy.
I get really tired of the snide nastiness that child prodigies get, even sometimes in threads on the SDMB, where you’d think that there are enough intelligent people to counteract that. People frequently assume that prodigies can’t turn out to be normal adults and that they must be some sort of freak. In fact, child prodigies generally turn out pretty well. Some turn to be absolutely first rate in their chosen field. Most of the others are successful enough to be as good or better than those people who go through their educational path at the normal rate and do well at their studies. Some prodigies burn out on their chosen field and decide to do something else. Rarely, some end up really messed up. This is called mental illness, and it’s no more or less common among child prodigies than among any other group of people.
A lot of this snideness is just envy. It bothers me because of things that I had to endure as a child. Let me make myself clear. I was not a child prodigy. I entered kindergarten at five not knowing the alphabet or how to count, I think. I entered first grade at six not knowing how to read or to add, I think. I graduated from high school at eighteen. I graduated from college at twenty-two and immediately entered grad school, so I did as well as most people going straight through school at the normal rate. If I had happened to live in some suburban school district where most of the families had been upper middle class or rich, I would probably have just been one of the top five or ten or twenty or whatever of the 250 students in my year who everyone knew would be able to get into some very selective college and wouldn’t have particularly stood out.
However, I grew up on a farm in a school district where nobody ever went to a really top college. Nearly all the fathers of the students were farmers or factory workers or both (like my father). As far as most of the people I knew were concerned, if you were the smartest person they could ever imagine, you might barely be able to scrape through at a second-rate college and come back to teach high school. When I told them that I wanted to go to some top college and major in math and then go to grad school and maybe get a Ph.D., their reaction was that I was a snob and a traitor. What was wrong with me for deliberately sticking out so much? Why didn’t I play football on the high school team like 105 of the 150 boys in my high school? The fact that I’m 4’11" wasn’t an excuse as far as they were concerned. In fact, I was in various extracurricular activities like band, chorus, and wrestling. Because I was willing to ignore what everyone told me, I went to a first-rate college, eventually got two master’s degrees, and have worked for the past thirty-one years as a mathematician.
Honestly I am not seeing any snide nastiness here. Just a curiosity about what ends up happening to some of these extreme multiple sigma outliers long term coupled with some of the usual WAGs, scattered “I’ve heards”, and a few attempts at cited answers.
There have been many sympathetic threads here discussing the difficulties associated with not fitting in as a child, many centered around the difficulties of a child having academic and intellectual interests and abilities that make them the odd one of the social crowd. Some posting experiences not all dissimilar to yours and some worried about their son or daughter’s happiness. The typical childhood travails of those labeled as “gifted.”
Sure one has to wonder what Yitzkak Perlman would be if he was born into a community more like your childhood’s … one assumes many with gifts live out lives never having them developed for lack of being planted in fertile soil.
But “gifted” is one thing and as used by the educational system is often no big whoop. Top 5% or 3% in one venue or another? Hell, top 1% … we all at least know people like that (and a large number here believe they are those people, and some likely are) and we have some sense of what happens to them. But these extreme outlier kids are outside of our experience; how do they end up?
The three people I’ve known who might fit in with an outlier description (two from my childhood, and trust me not me, and one a classmate of my eldest son) have also turned out as fine and grounded adults. The decent enough so far adult lives of these more extreme cases mentioned in this thread are also nice to hear about. But it is not snide to wonder if being unable to really have true peers growing up who match you at both social and intellectual levels will have consequences later on, to wonder if they regress to the mean later in life, to be curious about how they handle romance, to wonder if raw ability gets coupled with drive and habits of mind or makes some lazy and unable to tolerate failure and struggle.
Speaking of child prodigies, I give you Ronan Farrow, biological son of Mia & Woody. Not only brillant, but fortunately looks like his mother.
Maybe child prodigies can get into MIT when they grow up?
Yeah, he was(is) a genius, but not in the area of understanding good TV hosting. He was just imitating his idea of it and it he did indeed do exactly what you said.
I thought he did it in Dr. Ronald Phaneuf’s lab space at UNR, not in a home lab.
I think you are right about that part. He did build his own nuclear home lab but he didn’t go as far as fusion there.