Is it really common opinion that TT is smart because of his genes? I would think having a helpful and engaged math-fluent father and lots of encouragement from an early age has way more to do with it. You can't seriously believe that an introduction into mathematical thinking from an early age and close advision from math-fluent parents is only 10% of the reason that TT is where he is today.
> Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only two 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
I think genetics have more to do with this level of achievement than encouragement from an engaged father. Tao has 2 brothers - why aren't they mathematical supergeniuses too? Either he was born with a brain that has extraordinary analytical ability, or he was born with an insane work ethic not commonly associated with young kids. But even then, are there reports of him having to work super hard to understand things? If you can do advanced algebra at age 5, I'd say your brain is something extraordinary. Whether the underlying reason for that extraordinary brain is due to genes or some other trigger, it likely was not mainly due to an "encouraging father", IMO.
Regarding his brothers, imagine if IQ is like a bunch of switches. TT was born with all his switches flipped 'on' out of some maximum. His brothers were born with most of them flipped on, as were his parents. Having high IQ parents increases the odds of more switches being flipped on, but having all of them flipped is still innate.
You can't (your germ line mutations are fixed, and even if you could change your genes in place your brain has already developed according to the previous genetic code and environment). You can only choose where to direct the output of your already flipped switches.
People on Reddit are taking pills to try and do that. Sometimes you hear about them getting aggressive cancers. Other times you hear about them semi-successfully treating damage they did to their brains with past drug use. Randomized controlled trials never show anything, but if you're being held back from being a genius by one protein that you got a bad gene for, you'd be one of the positive testimonials without showing up above the noise in a trial. Who knows.
Ask again in 2122.
In the meantime, I guess, we all need to learn that our worth as a person is determined by who we are, not what we are.
Very impressive no doubt, and again, they are brothers, so genetics plays a part. But their achievements aren't even close.
His (younger) brother, Nigel achieved two bronze medals (placing 132nd and 114th overall) at the age of 15 and 16 [0]. Quite good, specially at a younger age than most participants.
Terence [1] got a gold medal (13th place) right before completing 13 years of age. He achieved a similar feat (28th place) around his 12th birthday and a more humble performance (87th place, but still better than his brother's best) around his 11th birthday. At 11, better than 58% of his competition, some of the best 17 and 18 year olds at competitive math in the world.
He is cited as "the youngest bronze, silver, and gold medalist, respectively, in IMO history." [2]
If I were to guess, his brothers and parents pushed him, and had more experience with teaching compared to their older son. They got him interested, and he went from there.
He was probably lucky to be the younger brother growing up.
Oh, then I was completely wrong :D I would think the youngest kids are generally the more academically advanced. (But this is coming from someone who has 0 kids :D)
I don't think you understand the difference between being good at math and being at his level. Good parents can make the difference between being good at math or mediocre at math, but not knowing higher level concepts at the age of 15 or so . Or PhD at 22 or something. There are thousands of professors in the US even in math, how many produce super genius math kids with similar ability? Two 120-IQ parents a more more likely to produce a 110 IQ kids than someone with a 170+ IQ like TT; that is something else.
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)
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!)"
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.
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."
> You can't seriously believe that an introduction into mathematical thinking from an early age and close advision from math-fluent parents is only 10% of the reason
Are you implying that if there isn't a mostly-genetic basis for his intelligence, the career success of his family members must be a complete coincidence?
