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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30018 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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IQ is an absolute requirement, but no amount of IQ will lead you to being a chess great if you started the skill at 16. Ed Witten seems like a bizarre anomaly as far as STEM goes, and I wonder how much his father taught him physics as a child — it may be that he had some childhood expertise but momentarily decided to pursue journalism.

he is an outlier and his dad probably helped in some way. But other examples are Peter Scholze and June Huh. The former only became interested in math at 14, and then, boom, best in the world by 2010.

Are you sure about Scholze? I couldn’t find anything but this

Scholze started teaching himself college-level mathematics at the age of 14, while attending Heinrich Hertz Gymnasium, a Berlin high school specializing in mathematics and science. At Heinrich Hertz, Scholze said, “you were not being an outsider if you were interested in mathematics.”

And his parents were in STEM, likely teaching him at an earlier age than his specialized high school.

it's not like he started at 10 or earlier like Erdos or Tao. age 14 is late compared to those child prodigies. another example is Maryam Mirzakhani, who took up math in her mid teens, and then also went from 0 to 100 seemingly instantly, winning contests and such.

We don’t know if his interest in math began at 14, only that by 14 he started teaching himself college-level math. In Maryam’s case, she enrolled in a specialized math middle school, so she started focusing mostly on math at 11-12. Anyway, when I read that these prodigies started at ~11-14, I think that it’s sad that they didn’t start at 5. Surely if they started at 5 they would be even better.

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