USA Today article about Whiz kid with HFA

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Savants can be creative, though. They don't have to be human computers. Look at some of the artistic savants, for example; you can see creativity there.

But I agree that the proper word for this kid is probably "prodigy"; learning something unusually quickly and young is different from having a natural talent for a narrow skill, as a savant does.

In general, the savant will have an extreme ability much above his other abilities; a prodigy will have all-around high abilities with an extreme talent in one or more areas. So the savant's skills are more widely scattered in general; most savants are autistic, developmentally delayed, or otherwise cognitively disabled, which produces those extreme scatters. There are probably people you couldn't categorize as one or the other particularly easily, though. The human mind doesn't really fit neatly into boxes.

I agree with you on that one.

There's also the dreaded compulsory "groupwork" scenario.
People seem to conveniently forget that not everyone works in the same style.
For instance, you could be at the highest level of Calculus or whatever but if you can't find a group to work in/people in your group won't let you get a word in edgeways, you can't use all of that skill/talent productively. You might have a novel idea on how to solve a technical problem, but if everyone else is talking about what they did at the weekend, you might not be able to share it fully. Worse still, you end up "talking over their heads" so your idea might get conveniently forgotten. I don't know why people promote this artificial and superficial method of working. I don't see how it helps in the real world, when I've been told that many people in the world don't work like this at all. They work independently then pool their thoughts/data. They don't start off with "let's all sit in a circle and have a nice chat". Well, they might do, but only after each of them has started to work independently on the problem, not before.

So basically, not everyone wants to hear about someone's brilliant ideas or success all the time. It can make other people feel bad. That's what competition does to people.

People may also struggle to understand that someone may be highly "intelligent" and yet have difficulties with "mundane" tasks like socialising. It is possible for someone to be socially "incapacitated" by that person observing the world in zoomed in detail. Not everyone is interested in the detail or an in depth analysis.