1. principles
  2. What About Tomb Raider?

What About Tomb Raider?

By drorzel on March 13, 2007.

The New York Times offers an article profiling Terence Tao, mostly focussing on his child prodigy background:

Dr. Tao has drawn attention and curiosity throughout his life for his prodigious abilities. By age 2, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his Ph.D.

Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius" award that comes with a half-million dollars and no strings.

There's no mention of his blog, or the Tomb Raider Interpretation of quantum theory.

I'm always a little ambivalent about these sorts of articles. While on the one hand, it's fascinating to read the life stories of really brilliant people, there's always a faint undercurrent of "look at the freaky smart guy!" to them that makes me wonder if they aren't counterproductive. They leave the impression that science and math are something that require phenomenal natural talent, and that people who aren't child prodigies shouldn't expect to understand it.

Tags
Science

More like this

Chess Intuition

Time Magazine has an interesting profile of Magnus Carlsen, the youngest chess player to achieve a number one world ranking:

Young Chemist?

Here is the story of a seven year old (supposed) prodigy whose parents are looking for a university which will enroll him.

The Buzz: Queens Pwn in Chess

While attempts to explain the disproportionate number of women in math and science have resulted in the conclusion that women are innately inferior to men in these areas, the methodology has often—if not always—been flawed.

Random things on Sports and Stuff

Watched this delightful interview by Gabby Logan with Agassi and Graf, two of my favorite tennis players when I was young. It was more than just two former professional tennis players talking.

Uncle Al's webmaster recently passed his five accrediting Microsoft Certified Professional Developer - Enterprise Applications tests. He averaged over 900/1000 each test. He walked in and took them cold. Intelligence does exist, it can be measured, it does make a difference.

The Severely and Profoundly Gifted should be cherished and embellished rather than crushed and discarded. Of $9.1 billion in California K-12 education disbursements, $6.0 billion went for 11% of special education kids (retards and cripples) while $3.1 billion went for 89% of general education students. Rotted flesh got 15.7 times as much funding as a normal kid.

Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) got $0.0495 billion or 0.09% of the budget, less than a tenth penny/dollar overall. Additional funding for the Gifted averaged $0.64/kid-day. How smart is that?