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Unusually, we have pretty good documentation about Prof Tao's background, childhood, and mathematical education. I found this a good read.

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)

2 comments

The entire Q&A is great. My favorite part is the snippet of his basic program for fibonacci computation.

   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!)"

If I asked the people close to you what you do/think differently than others, what would they say?

I don't think I come across as an alien. For example, I'm very deeply involved in my local Quaker meeting, and I don't think any of that is particularly different than others. That said, I can nerd out extremely deeply into a problem, to a point where I've noticed other people's eyes glaze over. Case in point, I've become interested in memory models for GPUs, and while most people in the field would be content to leave it there, I've actually dug into the Alloy code for the formalization of the Vulkan memory model (and found some issues along the way). I'd estimate there are probably less than two dozen other people in the world who have dug that deep, and, thinking about it now, I can see a pretty direct line to what child-prodigy-me would do in a similar situation.

1) When talking to others, do you feel that you need slow down a lot and simplify to give them a chance to keep up with you?

2) Is learning any topic easier for you than for an average person or are you so talented in just a few areas?

Very cool. Thanks for the response. I may be reaching but maybe genius is a combination of curiosity, processing speed, mental RAM and focus. Maybe each of those can be improved in regular people...

As a human high in curiosity and processing speed but low in RAM and focus, my personal experience is that diet+prescription drugs can unlock the rest.

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 hadn't thought of it but I see that I'm high RAM, high curiosity. Haha we should make a Meyers-Brigg for this.

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."