Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his o

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Something I found on one of my "Twitter subscriptions" that I thought was interesting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1HYceBp6u

A 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.

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And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet - his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity'.

His mother, not sure if her child was talking nonsense or genius, sent a video of his theory to the renowned Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University.

According to the Indiana Star, Institute astrophysics professor Scott Tremaine -himself a world renowned expert - confirmed the authenticity of Jake's theory.

In an email to the family, Tremaine wrote: 'I'm impressed by his interest in physics and the amount that he has learned so far.

'The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics.

'Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize.'

But for his mother Kristine Barnett, 36, and the rest of the family, maths remains a tricky subject.

Speaking to the paper, Mrs Barnett said: 'I flunked math. I know this did not come from me.'

And it hasn't gone un-noticed by Jake, who added: 'Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family they just stare blankly.'

Jake was diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, a mild form of autism, from an early age.

His parents were worried when he didn't talk until the age of two, suspecting he was educationally abnormal.

It was only as he began to grow up that they realised just how special his gift was.

He would fill up note pads of paper with drawings of complex geometrical shapes and calculations, before picking up felt tip pens and writing equations on windows.

By the age of three he was solving 5,000-piece puzzles and he even studied a state road map, reciting every highway and license plate prefix from memory.

By the age of eight he had left high school and was attending Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis advanced astrophysics classes.

His classroom presence is quite unnerving for many of the 18-plus year old students at his IPIU lectures.

Speaking to the Indy Star, Wanda Anderson, a biochemistry major said: 'When I first walked in and saw him, I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to school with Doogie Howser.'

She added: 'A lot of people come to him for help when they don't understand a physics problem.

'People come up to him all the time and say, 'Hey Jake, can you help me'.

'A lot of people think a genius is hard to talk to, but Jake explains things that would still be over their head.'

And his Professor John Ross said his performance in lectures had been 'outstanding'.

'When he asks a question, he is always two steps ahead of the lecture.

'Everyone in the class gets quiet. Poor kid. . . . He sits right in the front row, and they all just look at him.

'He will come to see me during office hours and ask even more detailed questions. And you can tell he's been thinking these things through.

'Kids his age would normally have problems adding fractions, and he is helping out some of his fellow students.'

According to his parents Jake has trouble sleeping at night as he constantly sees numbers in his head.

But far from complaining, Jake has turned the sleepless nights to his advantage - debunking the big bang theory.

The next step, according to professor Ross, is for Jake to leave class altogether and take up a paid research role.

That's so amazing,

If I'm not mistaken, it's long been suspected that Albert Einstein, himself, and other geniuses in many fields have been Autistic-
he, didn't talk until he was 4 (if I remember).

If Jacob, a diagnosed Apie, succeeds in revising Einstein,
it would spark a lot of conversation about what neuro-diversity including Autism contributes to the world.


Good for Jacob!

Now this guy is one that bill gates and the US gov should spend a couple of million bucks to get him the best education humanly possible..the potential benefits can be staggering.

The only critique I might have of the article is that it keeps stressing how the boy has an IQ higher than that of Einstein - ignoring the fact that relatively many other people do too and that Einstein was said to have a 'low' IQ in comparison to his genius. But that's the Daily Mail for you.

As an amateur student of physics, I'm slightly afraid of what changes he'll introduce But bring it on, Jacob Barnett!! I think I can speak for the whole of WP when I say that we're very proud of you

Also, getting a Tier 1 salary at the age of twelve? What a legend!

This is a very smart land. However we must wait to find out if his theories are empirically correct.

Here is a cautionary tale: Ed Witten, winner of the Fields Mathematical Prize (the "nobel prize" for the mathematicians under 45 years old) has given the most complete version of string theory. Only one thing is wrong: there is no empirical evidence to strongly support string theory. So as a physics theory, Witten's work is pure philosophical speculation and has little scientific strength.

ruveyn

I'm not sure if Einstein ever actually took an IQ test. If he did, it can't realistically be compared with the IQ tests that exist today. So much has changed in intelligence testing since Binet's original test that the numerical scores cannot possibly be directly compared.

170 IQ?

One word about this kid...WOW.

Seriously, he could be the next great scientist of the world.

The problem with kids like this is they usually over focus. Einstein was an aspie but he was able to diversify his thinking to revolutionize the whole physics field. If this kid wants to make a name for himself in the physics field he'll have to unify quantum and astrophysics into one unified theory.

Just throwing it out there: Does anyone here believe that IQ is mostly environmental instead of mostly genetic? I.e. do you think that his parents have done something just right for their kid to have such a high IQ, or was he just born that way?

It's probably a little of both. From what I've seen of society intelligence is a recessive gene.

Do I think they did something just right? Yes. They met, married and had unprotected sex at the exact right moment to get the exact right DNA combination. It had to be their DNA and it had to be the right combination.

Do I think that an ordinary kid with different DNA could achieve something like this because of how he was raised? No. I do not. There is an entire industry devoted to conning parents into thinking that genius can be created through parenting techniques. But there is absolutely no experimental or even anecdotal evidence to back that up.

There is somebody who rather famously tried. And she got pretty far with high achieving daughters.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 98754.html

She's the infamous Tiger Mom (infamous to parents, at least) who managed to get her daughters to have all A's and be very good at violin and piano through sheer parental force. But the two girls in the article are high achieving, which is rather a different thing than paradigm-challenging genius.

Believe me, whenever something like this happens (genius, prodigy, the sort of thing that winds up in the news), parents glom onto the story wanting to know what the parents did at home to make it happen. The story the parents give is always the same, whether it is this kid or Stephen Wiltshire or any other prodigiously talented young person. The parent, when interrogated about how they made this happen, always says "I just got out of his way". The parental input- beyond the lucky DNA- is always described as being limited to providing either supplies (a piano, a computer etc.) and facilitating opportunities by driving the kid wherever he needs to go and rearranging their own lives around his obsession, if that turns out to be necessary.

Plenty of parents of regular kids do this too. My own did. This doesn't create genius. It does result in a kid who has a concept of how to explore their own passions and pursue what interests them. In other words, not stifled. But genius? No. You can't create that with anything other than the luck of DNA.

The parents in this article clearly made no attempt to do this on purpose. They in fact worried about his development because he was a late talker.

There is no secret formula that these parents are in possession of or even stumbled upon by accident. There is only DNA and getting out of the kid's way.

Ah you beat me to the punch. That kid's awesome. I'm glad we have super intelligent people like that. especially in this day and age where people need relevant, existential answers about the origins of the universe and when everything seems to be falling apart politically and environmentally. I hope he figures out fusion.

There is no way you could ever teach Forest Gump calculus, no matter how long you tried, and the same thing applies to millions of people. That is why 'no child left behind" is nonsense.

Now imagine this: Aliens come to Earth in their flying saucer and show us antigravity and faster than light travel.

We ask them to teach us and being good natured aliens, they agree.

But our greatest scientists sit around like a bunch of chimps because it takes an IQ of 250 to understand these things and no human is that smart.

Perhaps we could be smart enough to build mental prosthetics to boost our natural brain power.

ruveyn

I have to go against the flow here and say that judging by the newspaper piece, it's pretty much impossible to say what is actually going on.

As far as I can tell, the kid hasn't actually done anything particularly interesting so far, he just says he is working on a theory of his own. The world is filled with people working on various very hard problems ... very few of them actually produce something worth mentioning.

Sure, the kid's has a high IQ and definitely impressive math skills for his age ... but that doesn't mean he is exempt from the rule that only results matter in the end. I believe he has made a significant contribution to relativity theory and/or the big gang theory when I see it documented and verified by a few other professionals.

As usual, this newspaper article is a feel-good piece, offering little evidence of the claims made. I suspect one claim make is factually false: the article says "Scott Tremaine ... confirmed the authenticity of Jake's theory", but the subsequent quotes don't really support this claim.

That said, I wish Jacob luck. He's going to need it