[Darkstryder]

As a father of an 8 years old, this is very moving.

While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.

[SJC_Hacker]

Can't find the reference but from an interview with his parents there apparently there wasn't much "nurturing" other than simply making available the necessary materials which he gobbled up. Its not like they put a made him practice for an hour a day.

A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.

[MrOrelliOReilly]

I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.

More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!

[kccqzy]

That’s simply not quite true if you read the article. When Terence Tao got stuck on a continued fraction problem, his mother told him to use the quadratic.

In contrast when I was a kid and was thinking about optimizing my program to print all prime numbers, my mother, instead of telling me about the sieve of Eratosthenes, told me to do school-approved math instead.

Now shoutout to my actual math teacher, who, having been told that I got stuck on writing a program to solve simultaneous linear equations, told me about Gaussian elimination.

[hnfong]

Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things.

With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.

[ferguess_k]

I think they deliberately underplayed their role in this. Especially with Asian parents who think such nurturing is part of the "norm". I wouldn't be surprised that they spent TONs of time tutoring him when he was young -- and when he was more or less self-bootstrapped they don't need to spend too much time.

But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.

[matsemann]

> and later on won the Putnam one year

Just the once, though, huh? [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079

[hgomersall]

In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

> If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful?

He learned to read and write by himself. I'm pretty sure he would've been fine regardless of shape.

[sfn42]

Where I grew up there wasn't any way to deal with those of us who did better. If you did worse there were all sorts of programs, they would move you to a separate small class so you could get extra help and stuff like that.

My problem was everything was too easy. I was bored. I would get reprimanded for not working because they gave us an hour worth of work, I finished it in 10 minutes and then did other stuff. I basically didn't have to study for anything, I just showed up and got Bs. If I put in 10% effort I got As. And all I ever got for it was yelled at for having done everything they asked me to do too fast.

So I started sitting in the back of the classroom minding my own business and trying not to be noticed. I'm convinced my life would have been very different if I hadn't been completely jaded from most of my teachers basically punishing me for being better than the rest. By my mid teens I didn't give a shit, I was happy coasting along doing better than the rest just by showing up.

My choices were my own and I'm doing pretty well now. Got my shit together in my late 20s and got a CS degree. Best decision I ever made. But I can't help but think I could have ended up on a path like this much earlier if my teachers actually supported me rather than treating me like a problem.

[PaulHoule]

There is the ideal of school and then there is school.

I was very 'school-shaped' if by school you mean I could sit quietly and read books and solve problems. More school-shaped than the other kids.

If by school you mean that bullies don't find you interesting, that nobody threatens to kill you, then I was not 'school-shaped' at all.

I was really excited to go to school on day one, within a year it tuned very bad and I wish, retrospectively, I'd had the courage to stay home.