← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · hqz
Thread ID: 12699 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-03-10
2004-03-10 20:11 | User Profile
[B]A Calculated Course[/B] Intel Scholarship Finalist Treasures Solitary Study of Math By Linda Perlstein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 10, 2004; Page B01
[SIZE=1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44515-2004Mar9.html[/SIZE]
The famed Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles said that in the seven years he devoted solely to solving one proof, only reading to his children could distract him. Gaurav Thakur, a 17-year-old from Rockville, hasn't found anything that can take his mind off his own intellectual quest.
"Legos," his father offered.
"No, with Legos I'm still thinking about math," Gaurav said.
For Gaurav, one of 40 national finalists for the top prize of a $100,000 scholarship next week in the Intel Science Talent Search, everything but math is a distraction to be pared to the barest necessities: Boiled vegetables for dinner. A navy-blue sweat suit. No idle conversation.
"When you're working on a problem as intense as Wiles's or Gaurav's, it's 100 percent concentration," said Larry Washington, a University of Maryland mathematics professor who mentors Gaurav.
For the past two years, Gaurav has had the luxury of the same single-minded focus that allowed Wiles to solve what is known as Fermat's Last Theorem in the mid-1990s. Long convinced that school was getting in the way of math, Gaurav begged his parents to pull him out of Thomas S. Wootton High School. Finally, they gave in.
"I don't think I would recommend this for everyone," said his father, Subhash Thakur, an economist with the International Monetary Fund. "It's really this exceptional devotion and unusual motivation he had that makes this possible."
Through a home-schooling organization, Gaurav follows a course of study that is his alone. Officially, he is in the 12th grade, but his math courses -- linear algebra, complex analysis -- are standard undergraduate work.
His 12-year-old brother, Amol, is a conventional sixth-grader who earns straight A's and likes to read and play computer games. His mother, Smita, is a homemaker who gets stuck helping Amol make a car out of compact discs, Magic Markers and a banana the night before it's due at school.
Gaurav said he doesn't understand why his dad would rather read the Financial Times than "A Course of Modern Analysis," the 100-year-old math classic Gaurav carries everywhere -- to the allergist, to Taco Bell. He said he believes that "everyone knows what the gamma function is." He believes, too, that the pure math he studies -- math so advanced it contains more symbols than numbers -- could be within anyone's grasp were they brought up in a culture where "I'm bad at math" wasn't a boast.
From the small first-floor study where Gaurav does most of his work, he does not realize the preternatural depth of his ardor and aptitude. But it was instantly clear to Maryland's Washington.
Though Washington is active in the local circle of young "mathletes" who participate in magnet school programs and national competitions, he hadn't heard of Gaurav until the teenager sent an e-mail to the university's math department seeking help with his Intel project.
This unknown student's project was 90 percent complete, and at the level of an original master's thesis, Washington said.
Gaurav's work in the field of "generalized factorials" is unlikely to mean anything to most people. As he wrote in his Intel submission, "I am inclined to select topics which are of interest by virtue of their mathematical elegance rather than their potential application."
He could, one day, find a job doing math with practical uses in physics or machine design, but he more often visualizes himself continuing his solitary quest for solutions after college -- starting at Maryland, he hopes.
"The Riemann Hypothesis is my best bet," Gaurav said. A proof of the theorem, which accurately estimates how many prime numbers exist below a certain number, has eluded the world's best mathematicians, despite a $1 million bounty one organization has offered for its proof.
Subhash Thakur said he is a little concerned by his son's passion for the Riemann problem. He half-jokingly discourages Gaurav's affection for the mathematicians the Thakurs call the Trio: G.H. Hardy, Paul Erdos and Grigori Perelman. In these men Gaurav sees the happiness that comes with mathematical discovery. His father sees people who have put math above love -- in a sense, above life.
Although Thakur appreciates math's beauty and has encouraged his son, he has allowed Gaurav only one book on Riemann, for now.
The Thakurs, who emigrated from India decades ago, have spent the past 13 years trying to figure out the right balance for Gaurav. At age 4, he multiplied two-digit numbers in his head; in kindergarten, his father said, Gaurav asked, "If multiplication is repeat addition, what is repeat multiplication?" -- and thus began to learn about exponents, and then logarithms.
Montgomery County public schools offer many programs for gifted students, and Gaurav tried them. In elementary school, he traveled to a high school in the mornings to study pre-algebra. He went across the county to be part of a middle school's math magnet program.
None of these lasted more than a few weeks. The math wasn't tough enough, and Gaurav wasn't comfortable in unfamiliar settings, his father said.
Starting in eighth grade, when medication for serious sinus problems started slowing him down, Gaurav began pleading to leave school. His parents, though, respected the school system. They didn't want him to be one of those 14-year-old college students.
"I talked to people who had done that," Thakur said. "I sort of computed that it wouldn't be good to push him beyond his age in terms of emotional maturity."
Gaurav didn't like much about school. He not only found the prom irrelevant, but also relationships, conversations. Given a problem set in physics, he would skip one question and produce pages of complex thought on the other, according to Wootton teacher Marty Patt. His parents came to realize that Gaurav would never be "well-rounded" and finally came to trust Gaurav's optimism toward making his own way.
So two years ago, they decided that they may as well provide him the time and freedom for math.
Gaurav awakes around 10 or 11 a.m. He naps in the early evening and stays up nearly until sunrise. He's usually working on math but devotes whatever time he must to his other courses; he reads the books for English and writes answers to discussion questions but doesn't do much discussing . Occasionally, Gaurav speaks with a Learning Community consultant and meets with Washington or former teachers he seeks out, but he has no regular tutor.
At other times, Gaurav builds Legos, dozens of creations that line his bedroom walls: a rocket launcher, a bulldozer, cars, planes, ships, all with motorized capabilities Gaurav imagined that are far beyond those laid out in the instructions. He plays FreeSpace 2, a space combat computer game, and discusses it and Legos on online bulletin boards. And late into the night, he watches cricket matches on satellite TV -- Hardy's favorite sport, too, with intricate subtleties a mathematician can appreciate.
His friends from middle school have moved away. Although Gaurav is cheerful and engaging, he is happy in his solitude. "I'm not sure why you're keen on all that friends stuff," he tells his parents, another of their friendly debates.
"We encourage him to go out," said his mother.
And so Gaurav has gone back to Wootton lately, to show his rocket launcher to the robotics club, at Patt's request. It's an intense, accomplished club, and the students were awed by Gaurav's work.
Gaurav was happy to come home to his math, where joy lay in the next tough solution.
Other D.C. Area Scholarship Finalists
Gaurav Thakur is one of five finalists from the Washington region in this year's Intel Science Talent Search.
The 40 finalists from across the country will gather in Washington beginning tomorrow for several days of social events, meetings with experts and presentations of their work. They will share $650,000 in scholarships; the top prize, to be announced Tuesday, is worth $100,000. Other area finalists are:
Melis Anahtar, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, whose project is related to the use of microelectronics and microfluidics in biology and medicine.
Andrei Munteanu, Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in the District, who invented an algorithm for computing the minimum distance between elliptical orbits.
Divya Nettimi, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, developed a method of calculating theoretically the rate at which myosin, a molecular biomotor, reacts with adenosine triphosphate, an energy source, and drives muscle contraction.
Gordon Su, Montgomery Blair, whose project analyzed globalization's impact on income inequality in China.
2004-03-11 05:52 | User Profile
Home-schooled children routinely, and by far, out-perform children from public schools. Look at the white kid that that phoney O'Reilly interviewed a year and a half ago. He was home-schooled AND he and his mother were homeless for much of the two years prior to his taking the SAT. He scored 1600 on his SAT.
This also is another demonstration of Asian parents making sure, riding, their kids to reach their full potential. It's probably safe to assume his parents ride him incessantly to study, study, study, etc. despite what the article may say. Having gone to a HS with a student body near 40% Asian (getting to see how it really was at home with these people) and attending UCLA with these folks, they make the most of their potential - whether as gifted as the kid in the article or not. Looking at the overwhelming dominance of whites in invention, innovation, creativity, technical breakthroughs, etc., one wonders what we would see if whites were to follow the same path - and get away from the zhid culture that envelopes them. The Asians, especially the more recent arrivals, avoid the culture, but as studies have shown, the more "Americanized" (ZOG hypnotized) they become, the lower their academic acheivement.
There is an interesting documentary out about one of the "National Spelling Bees" (there are several, it seems). The portions of the film that followed one of the contestants of Indian extraction was telling - his father came off as a guy trying to stifle his maniacal behavior in front of the cameras - as he would badger his kid into studying, and studying, and studying ...
Rban would have enjoyed it.
2004-03-11 14:02 | User Profile
Pearlstein obviously worships this kid, and seems to think he's a model. If this strange creature was a white kid being homeschooled by Christian parents, there's no doubt the story would have had an ominous tone, with an ending designed to instill doubt about any possibility for a happy future for the kid. The homeschooling aspect is at best a side issue in Pearlstein's view, apparently.
It sounds like the parents of this Indian kid are doing what they think is best, and it probably is. But this kid is more than a genius; some of the quotes seem to indicate he's at least borderline autistic. Pearlstein ignores this in her rush to promote her example of minority superiority.
2004-03-12 01:41 | User Profile
Weisbrot, if the kid in question were white, chances are you wouldn't have seen an article about him. We had a situation in LA about 6 or 7 years ago where a couple of white kids, 1600 SAT's, (one of them went to the "Physics Olympics" and "Math Olympics" etc.) were virtually ignored. However, the local and then National media did take the time to present the exploits of an Asian kid - whose credentials were not as impressive as the white kids - because he fit the bill. (Lord knows they're still searching high and low for the great black or mestizo hope when it comes to this type of thing)
There were grumblings in some quarters that the Westinghouse Talent Search had become "PC" (no pun intended) - and now that Intel is running things, the grumblings are increasing. Some claim Intel will stack things in order to provide something to point at as a defense of outsourcing. (I will admit that whites have drifted away from the 'hard' subjects in school in large numbers, due to they and their parents having been yidified by the culture)
Is the kid "autistic"? It's quite possible his parents have molded him into something that would resemble an autistic. Many Indians seem to be similar to the hordes of Chinese and Japanese parents who are on their kids before their first birthday to study, study, study. Believe me, I saw it all the time growing up. This is probably why despite the large populations of these countries, the huge numbers of dedicated students, and the levels of academic achievement, the real world performance of these "geniuses" pales in comparison to that of whites. Being able to understand, being able to memorize, are two elements of intelligence. But possessing those traits, giving one the ability to do well in academics, etc., isn't necessarily all one needs to take things farther. Dealing with the abstractions of original thought, being able to extrapolate, to create or invent from the information at hand, is quite a different talent. Something the hated and ignored white man seems to possess in spades.