Mathematics
Two Great Mathematical Child Prodigies
Mathematical ability at an early age
It’s very uncommon for children to have exceptionally strong mathematical abilities. By “mathematical ability,” I don’t only mean calculating and stuff like that, but also the ability of problem solving and understanding logic behind it. Throughout history, there have been many great mathematicians. Some acquire an interest in mathematics when they are young, some when they are older, and just a handful when they are as young as two, three, or four. In this article, I shall discuss the early lives of two such mathematicians who excelled in mathematics from a really early age.
Terence Tao
Often known as Terry Tao, Terence Tao is one of the greatest, most perceptive, and prolific mathematicians alive today and throughout mathematical history. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The vast majority of his work is pure theoretical mathematics. He has made a name for himself in a variety of disciplines, including harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing, and analytic number theory.
Born on July 17, 1975 in Adelaide, Australia, Tao did have a mathematical background. His father was a paediatrician who had undertaken research on educating gifted children and on autism, and his mother, who had received a first-class honors degree in astrophysics and mathematics, was a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.
Tao was exceptionally good at mathematics from his early days. He often says in interviews that he always liked patterns, puzzles, abstracts, and logic and has been interested in solving math problems from the earliest days of his life, as far as he can remember. Tao was two years old when his parents started to notice that he was different from other ordinary children. Once, his parents found him teaching some other older kids to count, spell, and add numbers using wooden blocks. He had taught himself how to read and do basic arithmetic when he was only two years old. Another memory he has is that once, when he was about three years old, he asked his grandmother to smear the detergent on the windows in the shape of numbers.
When asked by an interviewer about his early inspiration in mathematics, Tao replied,
“Ever since I can remember, I have enjoyed mathematics. I recall being fascinated by numbers even at age three, and viewed their manipulation as a kind of game. It was only much later, in high school, that I started to realize that mathematics is not just about symbolic manipulation, but has useful things to say about the real world; then, of course, I enjoyed it even more, though at a different level… “
When Tao was three and a half years old, his parents decided to enroll him in school. But, because Tao was an exceptional child, they realized six weeks later that school was not for him. It was also tough for his teachers to teach a genius like him. As a result, he stayed at home where his parents would teach him math until he was five years old. Later, he began to attend school like other children. At the age of eight, he started going to Blackwood High School in Adelaide. Tao began attending classes at Flinders University in Adelaide when he was eleven years old, in addition to his classes at Blackwood High School. At 14 years of age, he began full-time study at Flinders University. Garth Gaudry, who was his professor, used to spend a lot of time with him and eventually became his masters thesis advisor.
In 1986, Tao competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), representing his country, Australia. That year, he successfully won a bronze medal. He again participated in 1987 and 1988 and won a silver and a gold medal in the respective years. With that, Tao made the record of being the youngest bronze, silver, and gold medalist at the ages of 10 years, 363 days, 11 years, 364 days, and 13 years, 4 days, respectively in IMO. At the age of 14, he got to attend the Research Science Institute (RSI) and just after a year, he published his first research paper.
“Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.”
Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős is, undoubtedly, the mathematician who has spent the most time doing mathematics in one’s lifetime. He published around 1,525 mathematical papers, cooperating with over 500 collaborators. Such a huge number of papers, surpassing Leonhard Euler’s, still remains as the highest number of mathematical papers one has published. It wasn’t only the quantity of work that was impressive, but the quality as well. His works were on variety of domains of mathematics including discrete mathematics, graph theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. However, Erdős is best known for his contributions to number theory and combinatorics and also for proposing mathematical conjectures.
Paul Erdős was born on March 26th, 1913 in Budapest, Hungary. He developed interest in mathematics at a really early age. It was easy for him to acquire math books as his parents were both high school math teachers. His father became a captive for six years during World War I, so his mother had to work for long hours in order to earn a living, leaving little Erdős at home with a governess. He had two sisters who died a few days before he was born. His mother kept him home school until the age of ten, terrified that he, too, would develop a terrible childhood disease.
Erdős learned himself to read by reading mathematical books that his parents had left at home. Most of his childhood was spent with those math books. He could multiply three-digit figures in his brain by the age of three, and by four, he could calculate how many seconds a person had lived given his age. At four, he was able to even discover negative integers on his own. When asked by a friend of his parents, how much 250 less than 100 is, the four-year-old Erdős is said to have answered, “150 below zero.” His father introduced him to infinite series and set theory at the age of 16, which would become lifelong interests for him.
As mentioned in his biography (The Man Who Loved Only Numbers) written by Paul Hoffman:
Erdős began doing mathematics at the age of three, but during the final twenty-five years of his life, since his mother’s death, he worked nineteen-hour days, energized by 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. He was fond of saying, “ A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” When friends urged him to slow down, he always had the same response: “There’ll be plenty of time to rest in the grave.”
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