Smartest 10 year old in the world- Eurasian

[naix]

www.prweb.com/releases/2006/11/prweb480311.htm

Ainan Celeste Cawley. Started reading before he was one, etc. etc. In every sense a genius and prodigy. We are making our mark on society! ;D

[rob]

Read the write-up:

His dad's a self-proclaimed savant (clearly insecure), an actor+performance artist (exhibitionist + bullsh*tter tendencies), an author (usu associated with intellectual conceit and yearnings for publicity) and purported musical genius (who clearly didn't amount to much in the music world). The joint probability of 2 of these traits being true and underlining this as a scam job is at least 70%.

Ergo - total publicity stunt

Poor kid.

His mom's pretty

And isn't the whole baking soda + vinegar explosion trick standard fare when we're all 8/9 years old? Why dress it up as a dissertation in acids and alkali's?

Sorry, but I just don't buy this. This is Malaysian tabloid fare (just like the 'magnetic man' a few years ago who had stuck spoons to his stomach and got Singapore and Malaysia tabloid addicts into a frenzy)

And the fact, the kids blog is http://www.scientific-child-prodigy..com. Hello?

[milkman's baby]

You are so cruel, Rob. But it's hilarious.

[betahat]

For every Jon Stuart Mill (who was forced to be a prodigy by a domineering father) there are plenty of others whose genius emerged later in life. A colleague of mine graduated from MIT at age 19 after being home-schooled, but he's nothing special anymore at the level of top economic graduate students. And there are plenty of child prodigies who didn't go on to do anything exceptional later. Playing amazing piano when you're 5 or reading when you're 1 probably means you'll be above average, but it certainly doesn't mean you'll be anything special. Often we give these kids credit because they're good for their age, but their skill would be unremarkable for an adult. There are many skills that can only be gained with experience and exposure to other stuff.

I always chuckle when the record for youngest person to climb everest or circumnagivate the world, previously held by an 18 year old, is broken by a 17.5 year old.

But hey, I wish the kid luck.

[Ganbare!]

It's a good analysis but History is full of examples of young prodigies contributing greatly to their field later on: Mozart, Bernoulli, Gretzky..

[palavore]

Jan 14, 2010 12:28:27 GMT -5 rudiger said:

I don't giva chicken shît how smart the kid is. I wanna know how much positive change he can bring to this planet. Until then he's as good as Corky and every other kid to me

In 1944, there was an interesting case Sidis vs The New Yorker[/i]. Williams James Sidis, known to be a child prodigy, sued the magazine for invading his privacy when they did a followup and where his genius had taken him. The lower courts decided against Sidis, stating that his reputation as having been a child prodigy qualified him as a public figure.

The title of the article, Where Are They Now?. Here are some excepts. The article didn't place much of his adulthood in a favorable light, despite the fact the Sidis was living a life he chose.

William Sidis, who at the age of eleven made the front pages of newspapers all over the country, was a Harvard student at the time. To explain how he got there, we must look at his father, the late Boris Sidis. Born in Kiev in 1868, the elder Sidis had come to this country, learned English, and gone to Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1894. His specialty was that branch of psychotherapy which engages to alleviate the nervous diseases and maladjustments by mental suggestion.

[snip]

Boris Sidis began his experiments on his son when little William was two years old. It appears that he induced a kind of hypnoidal state by the use of alphabet blocks. The quick results he got delighted his scientific mind. The child learned to spell and to read in a few months. Within a year he could write both English and French on the typewriter. At five he had composed a treatise on anatomy and had arrived at a method of calculating the date on which any day of the week had fallen during the past ten thousand years. Boris Sidis published several papers in scientific journals describing his baby's achievements. At six, the little boy was sent to a Brookline public school, where he astounded his teachers and alarmed the other children by tearing through seven years of schooling in six months. When he was eight years old, William proposed a new table of logarithms, employing 12 instead of the usual 10 as the base. Boris Sidis published a book about his amazing son, called "Philistine and Genius," and got into Who's Who in America.

The wonder child was going on nine when his father tried to enroll him at Harvard. He could have passed the entrance examinations with ease, but the startled and embarrassed university authorities would not allow him to take them. He continued to perform his wonders at home, and began the study of Latin and Greek.

[snip]

William James Sidis seems to have achieved the "perfect life" he had spoken of on the day of his graduation, the life of seclusion. Apparently he drifted from city to city, working as a clerk, or in some other minor capacity, for a salary only large enough for him to subsist on. In 1924 he was dragged back into the news when a reporter found him working in an office in Wall Street, at twenty-three dollars a week. He was dismayed at being discovered. He said all he wanted was to make just enough to live on and to work at something that required a minimum of mental effort. The last few reporters who went down to his office to interview him didn't get to see him. He had quit his job and disappeared again.

[...]

William James Sidis lives today, at the age of thirty-nine, in a hall bedroom of Boston's shabby south end. For a picture of him and his activities, this record is indebted to a young woman who recently succeeded in interviewing him there. She found him in a small room papered with the design of huge, pinkish flowers, considerably discolored. There was a large, untidy bed and an enormous wardrobe trunk, standing half open.

[snip]

His visitor was emboldened, at last, to bring up the prediction, made by Professor Comstock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in 1910, that the little boy who lectured that year on the fourth dimension to a gathering of learned men would grow up to be a great mathematician, a famous leader in the world of science. "It's strange," said William James Sidis, with a grin, "but, you know, I was born on April Fools' Day."

Snipping this article reminded me of how nicely they wrote only half a century ago.

[naix]

www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/articles/4ina/Article This is him 4 years later. I pasted the wrong article it seems. Pretty impressive, although by and large I do agree with the statement; "early rise, early rot."

[betahat]

^It's a good analysis but History is full of examples of young prodigies contributing greatly to their field later on: Mozart, Bernoulli, Gretzky..

Of course there are child prodigies that went on to be famous. But of course we only know that they were child prodigies BECAUSE they went on to be famous. There are far more child prodigies who didn't do anything special to enumerate and history has forgotten them because they never accomplished much. I'm more willing to believe in a correlation between early and later performance for athletics or musical performance, because physical abilities as well as discipline, confidence, and repetition are so important. I'm less willing to believe it for creative professions and more intellectual pursuits, because true originality and creativity is so rare, and those are not typically traits you associate with a child prodigy (who is just someone who can do something a typical person does many years earlier - there is still no evidence this kid is any smarter than your typical science major at a good university, and I certainly wouldn't project his 12-15 year head start into future Nobel laureate status). Maybe math and chess are areas where there is a higher correlation - now that Norwegian chess player Magnus Carlson is damn impressive, but then again he IS at the top of his field so he's no longer a "child prodigy" - he's just one of the top players in the world of any age.

[penguinopolipitese]

boy. sometimes I just want to beat the s*** out of eurasian kids. ....perhaps as in highlander there can be only one.

[naix]

Jan 18, 2010 4:54:32 GMT -5 penguinopolipitese said:

boy. sometimes I just want to beat the s*** out of eurasian kids. ....perhaps as in highlander there can be only one.

?

[fei]

^ lol sometime i feel the same way about that as well, Like self denial there nobody like me around out there. As Daffyd Thomas of Little Britain "The only gay in the village"...Well in my term "The only Eurasian in the city"...