alt Hacker NewsTerence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]
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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.
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.
Especially interesting since intelligence is much more environmental than most people assume: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-n...
At 8 years old I was able to expertly dismantle many radios.
Was still a few years away from reassembly.
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!)"
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.
When will a SOTA model beat the best mathematician on earth? Similar to Chess and Go examples. It has to be getting close.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My brain initially parsed the title as an obituary title and I was really sad for a moment.
I am interested in his new book, "Six Math Essentials", but I doubt it will be on my very low level of math understanding..
He’s on Star Talk this week. https://overcast.fm/+AAzXlUoaiV0
Wow, incredible read! Amazing what motivated peple (and children!) can achieve.
For a split second I read this headline as "Terence Tao dead at … years old" and was shocked
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)
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.
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.
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]
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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...
I could have been just like him if I tried hard enough.
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.