[RMarcus]

Looks like he got a master's degree from UIUC and did some research on FFT implementations. Seems to have been successful. What makes you say he was 'considered a "bad student"'?

(This is a genuine question. I've never met Alex in person, but if an applicant to my lab spent their free time diving into SIMD implementations and breaking records for computing mathematical constants, I'd rush to hire them. Not that either of those two things is a requirement, of course.)

[kolbe]

It's in his bio.

"However, ever since grade school, I've always sucked in terms of grades and standardized tests. I graduated from Palo Alto High School in the bottom quartile among all the college-bound students. My GPA was barely a 3.0 at graduation, so it was somewhat miraculous that I got accepted into Northwestern University at all."[1]

I know he has a masters and all, but he is spectacular. Hundreds of thousands of people have masters degrees. He is more impressive than 99% of professors, and academia doesn't even acknowledge him as a peer of them.

[1] http://www.numberworld.org/about/ayee/

[nocoiner]

The fact that he got into Northwestern is proof in itself that the “system” didn’t consider him to be a bad student. It actually seems like the system did a pretty good job of identifying sheer intellectual horsepower and potential despite the self-professed low GPA and standardized test scores.