Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Albert Einstein
Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Albert Einstein
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/110327/Timestwo/t2_09.html
This story is amazing:
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/110327/Timestwo/t2_09.html
This story is amazing:
12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics. Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 - higher than Albert Einstein - and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role.
The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours. And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet - his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity'.
Comments
My HUGE issue is I can't write so I output very little so I appear to be how can I put it err umm . stupid . lazy . a bum . But its that I communicate verbally way better then on paper is the issue .
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Gifted: Aspergers syndrome and child development
Autism: A condition that starts in early childhood, usually involving serious developmental disabilities with social interaction and communication. People with this disorder can have a range of abilities, from being severely disabled to gifted. It is estimated one in every 150 child has the condition.
Aspergers: A syndrome that is similar to autism, but with the distinction that those with it typically function better, have normal intelligence and near-normal language development. Savant: Rare condition in which persons with developmental disorders have astonishing islands of ability, brilliance or talent that stand in stark contrast to overall limitations.""""
what I want to know is how do some of the" smart" kids like him get around the legal issue of grade school.
My parents tried with no success..
See for me I feel K 12 was a waste of My time learning wise . unlike college ..
Peter KG6LSE
That kid is really smart :-)
I feel smartish when with most groups of people but next to this boy
I'm a drooling moron.
KG6LSE, I don't have anything like aspergers but I do have OCD
so I know what it's like to be a bit different.
Someone else here on the board once mentioned that they had aspergers.
I can't remember who it was but they were one of the really smart members.
He currently can only say 3 words on his own initiative,
1. more
2. come
3. i want
I was one of these smart kids myself (if you convert my ACT score to a Z-score and back to IQ, since my parents adamantly refused to let me take an IQ test as a child, you get a number similar to Jake's.) Only like Peter, my parents were committed to seeing me through high school so I'd have a normal social development. (FAIL.)
This article does several of the things I really hate about this kind of article. First of all, Einstein wasn't all that smart; he had a really particular delusion that happened to be right, and if his model of the universe (which he developed because he didn't see relativistic effects while riding his bicycle) had been wrong, we'd know him as Early Timecube Guy instead of the Prototype Genius. But OMG if youre IQ is higher than Einstein's you must be saving shelf space for the Nobel. As if. Now if they compared him to Alan Turing...
Second, as I have often told the people who fawn on me because I am so smart, if you scratch a genius you will generally find something seriously wrong underneath the veneer of smart. My parents were control freaks and I had no friends my own age until I was in 11th grade. My situation blew up in a confrontation with my parents (over, gasp, the fact that despite their best efforts I actually met a girl) that resulted in me not talking to them for 17 years. (We eventually patched it up but my wife won't talk to them to this day.) Jake is going to have a harder fall than I did, because everyone in his life is telling him how smart and great and wonderful he is but nobody is preparing him for the train wrecks in his future. Such as, any time now, puberty.
In another venue there is a certain female blogger I'd bring up here, because she illustrates this better than anyone I've ever encountered; she is both much smarter than me and much more screwed up, in ways that range from amusing to horrifying depending on her mood. She was an extremely talented engineer who walked away from a high paying job because she was so poorly socialized she simply could not function in a work environment with other random people. Her experience is instructive, but her current output is extremely, as they say on some boards, NSFW.
As for me, when I was a kid everyone thought I should be saving shelf space for the Nobel but at 47 years old I find myself still working for the little industrial controls company. I've built a lot of Smile over the years and people are consistently impressed with how well it works. I get to play with cool tools of my own choosing and my boss mostly leaves me alone to work my magic without interference. And I met a girl and we made a home. With all that, I think I can live without the Nobel.
Now I agree that genius wasn't the right word to describe him. Tenacious and really focused are probably better. Turing on the other hand was a genius as people who knew him said he thought effortlessly about problems that stymied other very smart people.
@william, sorry to hear about your son's problem. I hope things improve for him.
Also, it is interesting that his first work on the photoelectric effect, a very quantum phenomenon, directly contradicts this latter direction in Einstein's work. I'm not sayin' myself, but I have met a lot of people who think his wife did that work. This was not uncommon in those days. Otto Hahn was outraged that Lise Meitner didn't share the nobel with him for discovering fission; Richard Rhodes makes a strong case in TMOTAB that it was Meitner who had the critical insight as to what was making those huge spikes on their detectors. But then even more than now nobody took a woman's work seriously.
So what are the chances that he, like so many whizkids before him, will get sucked into the black hole of String Theory, never to emerge with anything but some wild yarns?
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301366227&sr=1-1-catcorr
http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/061891868X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1301366279&sr=1-1
-Phil
In my case theatre made me more social! *I *literally grew out of my label of aspergers .
Still to this day I *am not "normal" in the sense of most of the US,
but that”s OK as I now function as a normal member of society .
If you met me in real life outside of my room you would have a hard time seeing my aspergers .
I see this in a kid who just came to this college last term. Brett, who has aspergers,
is SO awkward around others . *I feel bad for him as he not painting a good picture of himself here. *Other kids have already started to rag on him as he carts with him a full laptop, an Ipad, an Ipod touch and a Droid phone. * He asks really odd questions at very inappropriate times, and he argues and butts into others’ conversations.
I hate to say this but he may not last here.
As far as boy wonder .. I don’t want to say he is not gifted and I am the next Oppenheimer but I’ll be blunt: *I was just like him at the age of 10, not with math but with those all-in-one kits at the shack in the 90s. *He draws on the window. *I used a wet erase marker and drew *on the bath room tiles full circuits while in the tub when I was young .
For years I was babysat by the Radio Shack down in the mall and I would know what a customer needed before the store manager did, who was a retired EE from some big company. * He took me under his wing and was a so influential to me being who I am .
In 2000 or so I hit a high spot in my electronics career.
By the way I am entirely self taught in electronics. I started with the Forrest Mimms books at age 5 and was hooked for life and by the age of 10 I was reading college EE text books for more info.
In 7th grade I taught a 2 day lecture on lasers in Middle school as Mr Holcomb could not understand the Idea of stimulated emission of radiation very well.
I used my first blue LED that year I got for a whopping $12 .. for the class .
Fast forward to 2001…I started on a tesla coil and it was a turning point as IMHO understanding resonance is a HUGE concept to grab for someone in the 9th grade !!
The TC is a great tool to teach that ,.
One day I visited Harvey Mudd as My dad was a Dean at CGU down the street .
I was there for a college visit ; well in the EE lab I asked a 2nd year student what he was doing and he said the black box lab . I asked him what the box did and he said at 400Hz and above he had 0 loss but below he had 10dB Loss . ( at the time I did not know Exactly what a dB was but I knew it was a relative measurement.)
I said "Oh it’s a high pass multi pole LC filter , See it has a C in series to pass HF and block LF and the L in parallel to pass HF and Shunt to ground LF " , and his response was "what . who huh?" and the prof pulled me out of line and said *“don’t be giving my students the answers please."
(Later that year I bumped into the same student and he said "Hey yea you where right all along")
Before I Knew the formulas I KNEW what was happening inside but I did not know how to describe it . . I ended up with My tesla coil going to the LA County Science Fair and met Dale Hall . who was at the time a TRW then NGC employee who worked in VIPS a vacuum insulated Power supplies for the NASA TDRS and other satellites in the 70s .
Dale and his connections got me involved with FIRST for team 294 and with TRW too .
He got me clearance to meet the top LASER Solid state physicist in the US Dr .Haggop at TRW, who was the lead designer for THEL and M THEL .
I spent a day in his lab and he was VERY impressed with my understanding of how amplitude phase conjugation was done.
Later that year I made larger and larger coils and made Venom in the end which can do 10' plus bolts .
In 09 I was a part of SPS Society for Physics Students, in the physics science lab at MtSAC College.
I was a key part of a team to make a coil gun. * They were stuck with how to fire a coil at 900V and charge the cap bank . Um SCR fouks Durp . *I did all the wiring and got it to shoot truth a soda can on the first fire .
I also in 09 helped with the VEX robotics team at MtSAC to help them win the excellence award. *I made Beta in a day and It was the the Key bot that won us the award .
That and my understanding of NiCd cells let me provide as many mAs as I could to the robots . *Ours never died on the field from a dead battery.
Oftentimes parents are the ones who get lucky with their kid and the fact Princeton was involved was a good reason why it made the news .
I find it odd--My dad was a dean and had plenty of connections to exploit my talent and he did not and I am happy he did not because this way I had a more normal ( as normal as a aspergers kid can have) childhood.
Now I not only tutor the kids here but I help teach the professors new stuff they don't understand ( mind NOT in class) I fix everything that comes to my door here and I am called Mr Radio shack for a reason I have the answers to almost any question that folks ask me.
I can see things without the math . It’s odd but I can see in a circuit and understand what is going on at a very deep level .
I don’t know how to explain what I see but I know it’s right .
For instance EM waves--I just can see how most antennas just work . I can visualize the E and the M fields in my head .
Wave guides are a a LC Stub tuned at the operation Freq .
Just like a ladder line stub but in a continuous form .
I got this concept at the age of 14 . while looking at a rain gutter .
In 2002 I got the idea of underwater comms using Magnetic fields so buddys can Comm with out Super expencive gear for a few feet .
I *used a piezo element as a mic they are brass and thus water resistant to a extent .
and a LM 386 to boost the Mic and a NE 602 to boost the AF to 440 KHz I used a am radio IF cristal for a LO . it worked great and it was cool cause you needed to be 3 or less feet away face to face for it to work so if you had a few divers you can tune out the others by just not looking at them .
It's been years but I do recall seeing a study that showed many such child prodigies go into fields that do not use their skills. That rings very true to me.
TRUE !!!!!!!
I am now in theater and not electronics as my main Job in life .
This is because I am not in the mood to be a Line tech for some Huge company .
I am a think tank kinda guy .and see Tech theatre as a think tank Kinda place as each show needs some thing different.
Peter ........
I read a true story about some queen of some sort who very badly wanted her portrait painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, so she sent a messenger who was instructed not to return until he brought back Da Vinci. After searching long and hard, the messenger found Da Vinci hunched over a table, obsessed with trying to "square the circle." When offered a large sum of money to paint the queen's portrait, Da Vinci balked, said he wanted nothing to do with art, and forced the messenger out the door. The messenger returned again and again, until finally Da Vinci physically picked up the man and tossed him into the street.
Some people more than others seem to experience/suffer the Right Brain vs. Left Brain phenomenon. After long periods of time using one side of their brains, they might then "switch sides" for a while. Other people switch sides throughout the day or in the course of a week - grinding away at one function, only to let loose later on doing something on the other side. I think something like that often happens to prodigies. One side is in hyperdrive but might later on throw itself out of gear or change gears completely, seeking to develop the other side of the brain. For many years it's puzzled psychologists how mathematicians seem to do their best work when in their twenties, but then seem to fizzle out by the time they're 30. Writers tend to fizzle out in their mid-40's. Musical composers, by contrast, seem capable of doing great work throughout their lifetimes, yet might drastically change how their music "works" after going through periodic emotional upheavals. Perhaps it's something they should "warn" gifted and talented kids about - if their identity is invested in one special field, their brain hunger might later drive them to derail that very identity as the brain searches for new ways to grow. Research has shown that people who routinely use both sides of their brain tend to survive strokes and other brain traumas, including aging, much better than single-sided brains. I suppose there's more opportunity for re-routing and re-purposing parts of the brain so long as it's all used to doing something. Problem is, normal society functions by people getting fitted into some sort of slot early on and then the machinery is supposed to work from then on, so jumping slots kinda grinds up the social transmission. What's the old saying? Art is long but life is short... I think the same goes for science, too. In fact life is short no matter what you do, so it's hard for some people to cram all those aptitudes into a single lifetime. These brain things... sometimes they're just too dang greedy for knowledge and experiences, ya think?
@william: When I was like 4-6, parents told that I seldom speak. Only a few words. Not really sentences. But I grew up okay, I learned new words quicker after the age. Have you consulted a paediatrician? Maybe it is not autism on times.
@PeterKG6LSE: Unfortunately, I was not labelled as "normal" in the usual sense in my place too.
Long story short - I have interests which are totally different than the ones in my social circle. While others enjoyed company, cinema, expensive smartphones, Left 4 Dead/Starcraft/Defence of the Ancients, I do not ever think about these so often. Reason is, I got bored on these. The newer movies in the cinemas often made me sleep for no particular reason, and I'm not amazed on the expensive smartphones. Neither do I ever enjoy the neverending-click-fest of these games mentioned. I do not have much friends, only close friends. That is why, there are many folks labelling me as "weird" or "crazy" because I do not conform on their "social specifications". It was depressing to be pushed around by my coursemates during my study because I do not play what they were playing. I do not talk much too, and prefer to talk if I have to. The more funny thing is, I do not have a Facebook too.
On my free time I like to read, and do microcontroller experiments, and sometimes doing maths and transforms. I do play the guitar too, but I'm classically inclined.
I do not know whether I even have Asperger or Autism. I prefer not to take labels at the moment.
AMEN !!
thats what happend to me in 09' right as I was graduating from College the first time .
I felt burnt out in electronics and till I found THIS site I was kinda in electronics Idle mode not really doing any thing cool .
I like to keep my brain pipe line and buffer full but I need to get away from one side of life I go to the other and your right it happens often more then once a day ..
Part of the reason I do theater is to grow My Artsy side . heck I took up piano again after not touching one in over 10 years !!!!!!!!!!!!!! .
Some days ill just do costumes for college and some days ill tinker for hours Like to day with a 2.4 GHz Video TX for ATV ..
Do hope the fact I can use both sides of my brain will help me be a Much more rounded person .
I feel it has !! .
Peter
I just finished a new bio of Alan Turing. A really amazing guy!
I posted about the book in this forum a few days ago if you want to
find out what book it is. Now I'm reading another bio by the same writer
about Richard Feynman.
It's so nice you met a girl and have a home :-) Is she the same one you met in 11th grade?
That female blogger you mentioned, that story distresses me, I sure hope she ends up all right. :-(
(I wonder who she is, and have I run across her on the web...does she blog about quantum computing?)
About Einstein, I think he was a really smart guy but I find it disappointing that he could not embrace
quantum mechanics fully. He broke away from the Newtonian view but could not go far enough to accept probability and uncertainty...I guess it was just too spooky for him to handle. He once asked
Niels Bohr if he actually believed that the moon was not there if no one was looking. Bohr said, "well, prove to me that it would still be there"
I have to admit that the role of the observer in quantum physics makes
me freak out just a little too.
@PeterKG6LSE: The brain is a dynamic structure. I would assume (safely) that humans uses both sides of the brain. Unfortunately, my one-semester course of Neurobiology is rusty already, so I might need to refer back to the notes I kept under my bed.
The two halves of the brain are connected by a bridge of tissue
called the corpus callosum
Some people even think that the two sides are separate minds!?
I'm not at all certain about that...I lean toward the notion that we
are connected to the brain by some quantum method not yet
understood.
I read a great book by Roger Penrose that is related to these matters.
This is a very readable book and mathematical formalism is kept to a
minimum.
from the book Research on Quantum Neurology carried out by Mathematical Physicist Sir Roger Penrose led to the hypothesis that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. Core to both theories is the notion that the collapse of the Quantum Wavefunction (see Quantum Electrodynamics) plays an important role in brain function through microtubules.
Mathematical Physicist Sir Roger Penrose
-Phil
I met my wife when I was a junior in college (age 19, and that was with being held back) and she was in graduate school (age 25). I found her world-view ("When I was a child I was often sure I had somehow been born on the wrong planet") powerfully attractive. Unfortunately our romance created a perfect storm which resulted in a bunch of shattered ties, including mine with both my parents and the education system in general. I decided I was tired of learning how to possibly do stuff in the world later and once I had to actually go out in the world and do stuff, I found that a lot more satisfying than being in school so I never looked back.
The blogger I mentioned is OK, for some definition of OK. She lived in a tent for several years but very cleverly was able to steal electricity and internet access, so she spent much time selling scavenged items on eBay to buy food and supplies and maintaining her blog. She claims this was the happiest time of her life. When a state highway project threatened her site some of her blog fans "rescued" her, for some definition of "rescued," and I'm not real sure how that relationship works since it's only visible through the lens of her own reporting, and she admits she cannot really understand other peoples' motivations. (Her savantitude is directed more at higher dimensional geometry, but she does post a lot about general science.) If you'd ever seen her blog you would know who she is now.
As for the observer in QM, if you imagine that the Universe is a big computer that has to actually spend time processing all that stuff that magically happens when you maintain coherence, I think the "observer" might just be any arrangement where maintaining coherence becomes too computationally intensive. Living things are of course chaos machines that multiply potential outcome trees like crazy, but a much simpler arrangement of potential cascading results would probably also create the same effect.
I read about Turing's troubles with the authorities, what a stupid episode that
was in British history :-(
That's awful about your troubles with your family... I can't imagine
being estranged from my family. Two or three years ago I wanted
to go to college and take engineering courses for some sort of degree
so I could get a higher paying job. but I dreaded it because it would
mean I had to quit working and programming and I find being with other
people actually doing tech so exciting. My circumstances have changed
now and I don't need to worry much about higher pay so when I am free to
do it in about 7 months I think I will just find a great school somewhere
and audit whatever courses I find interesting, just so I can learn enough
to really know what I am doing.
I'm so glad that lady is OK, I hope she is not living in a tent somewhere.
These sorts of stories make me wonder how many intellectual and artistic treasures are lost to history because their creators can't adequately interface with the drooling cud-chewing herds of normal society. Isaac Newton reportedly sat on his Calculus for quite some time and only pulled it out when he thought somebody else was going to get credit for developing it. How many Newtons are out there now, their shabby dwellings littered with bits of mind-boggling, world-changing materials that will someday be rolled up with the dirty rugs and shipped to the dump?
I confess I'm a little suspicious about this blogger. Her supposed name sounds a little too close to Fake Name, so how does anyone know she's done anything but what she says she does when she's not doing math?
-Phil
Indeed, that's a very curious phenomenon. I've always been puzzled by how agriculture appeared all around the earth at approximately the same time even though people were separated by thousands of miles, vast deserts and oceans. Might it have something to do with that "spooky action at a distance," or that inexplicable observer effect or ???
Occam's Razor. If she is hoaxing, it is the longest-running, most elaborate, and most successful hoax of its type I've ever heard of, supported with many photographs and what would have to be a multi-year full time effort on someone's part. And while she is quite an extreme character, she's not all that incredible; I've personally known someone about as autistic as she seems to be (but without the savant part), and her other obsessions only seem unusual because we see them through the lens of her autism. (The person I knew IRL was just as prone to hypergraphia sexualis, but his tastes were fortunately more conventional.)
IME people can be not only more perverse than you imagine, they can be more perverse than you can imagine :-)
I dunno about that. I've got a fairly outlandish imagination and I bet I could win some medals at the NSMA Olympics. My only real question concerned her intellectual achievements. I didn't see any links to that aspect of her life, and it's one thing for her to say she's some sort of towering intellect, and another thing to actually be that. So I was just wondering if she really was the brainiac she claims to be or if her claims could be just another, shall we say, manifestation of her, shall we say, lifestyle. I wouldn't be surprised either way.
NSMA = Nothing Shocks Me Anymore
Yes, she definitely is. That is one thing that can't be faked. Real or hoax, there is someone very smart doing the science part of that blog, and again Occam's Razor suggests that the girl just is what she claims to be.
Also, we really, really shouldn't be discussing this in public at Parallax, even if we are avoiding the infamous URL.