Super Humans - Jean Piaget

I already wrote about Piaget in the "IQ test origin" series. I will post here only the relevant part regarding his achievements as an young prodigy.

Jean Piaget was a precocious child who demonstrated a keen interest in animal life and an encyclopedic knowledge of biology and taxonomy. When he was ten years old, he began volunteering at the Neuchâtel Museum of Natural History. The museum's director, the seventy year-old naturalist Paul Godet, took him on as his assistant and apprentice, and paid him for his work by giving him rare specimens for his personal collection (Vidal, 1994). Piaget continued to work at the museum for four years, and his interest in the natural sciences continued to grow. His professional accomplishments in this area were numerous, beginning at age ten when he published a paper on the albino sparrow, and culminating with a doctoral thesis on the classification of mollusks when he was twenty-one. After completing his Ph.D., Piaget spent several months studying psychoanalysis at the University of Zurich. He was a promising student, and his contemporaries believed that he would eventually make important contributions to this field (Vidal, 1994). However, a serendipitous opportunity presented itself, and Piaget soon found himself working for Théodore Simon, co-author of the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. Simon placed him in Binet's laboratory, and set him to work standardizing Cyril Burt's reasoning tests on Parisian children. Piaget thought that the standardizing task was dull, and he never finished it. However, his clinical interactions with the children were not without interest. He began to notice that children of similar ages made similar types of mistakes, and it occurred to him that Simon, Binet and Burt might be asking the wrong question: Perhaps the key to understanding human intellectual development is not in what children get wrong, but how they get it wrong. It was clear to Piaget that childish reasoning is not merely less accurate than adult reasoning; it is qualitatively different (Wadsworth 1996). From this point forward, Piaget dedicated himself to answering the question "How does knowledge grow?" Piaget eventually came to believe that intelligence is a form of adaptation, wherein knowledge is constructed by each individual through the two complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. He theorized that as children interact with their physical and social environments, they organize information into groups of interrelated ideas called "schemes". When children encounter something new, they must either assimilate it into an existing scheme or create an entirely new scheme to deal with it (Wadsworth 1996). Piaget also believed that intellectual development occurs in four distinct stages. The sensorimotor stage begins at birth, and lasts until the child is approximately two years old. At this stage, the child cannot form mental representations of objects that are outside his immediate view, so his intelligence develops through his motor interactions with his environment. The preoperational stage typically lasts until the child is 6 or 7. According to Piaget, this is the stage where true "thought" emerges. Preoperational children are able to make mental representations of unseen objects, but they cannot use deductive reasoning. The concrete operations stage follows, and lasts until the child is 11 or 12. Concrete operational children are able to use deductive reasoning, demonstrate conservation of number, and can differentiate their perspective from that of other people. Formal operations is the final stage. Its most salient feature is the ability to think abstractly.


The full post here

Super Humans - Gabriel See

   Gabriel See, born in 1998, achieved a 720 out of 800 score on the SAT math test at age 8, Performed T-cell receptor research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at age 10, and at age 11 won a silver medal at the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition on synthetic biology for undergraduate college students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2011 he was named one of the US's top 10 high school inventors by Popular Science magazine. He has been taking upper division courses each semester at the University of Washington since 2010.

   I find very interesting the way his parents are trying to support him (as is described in an article from 2011, in Seattle Times):

   "His parents, Jason and Valerie, want him to have a normal teenage upbringing, so for half the day Gabriel attends a small, arts-oriented junior-high school in the Lake Washington School District called Renaissance School of Art and Reasoning, where he takes dance, drama and language arts.  He started taking upper-level math classes at the UW in 2009, and in 2010 began taking graduate math classes; this quarter, he’s taking applied linear algebra. He’s on the YMCA Sammamish Swim Team, takes music classes and plays Ultimate Frisbee on Fridays. Quiet and reserved, Gabriel is most comfortable discussing advanced mathematics or molecular biology. He’s not good with questions about typical teenage pursuits, but he will explain to you the concepts he is studying in applied linear algebra this fall, if you are smart enough to understand him. When he’s not in class, he’s working through a stack of books at home; he keeps a list of everything he has read. He’s absorbed 52 textbooks on science and math: read the physics lectures of Richard Feynman, and books on robot programming, systems biology, immunobiology, fractals, Latin (a new passion), music theory and the work of Fibonacci, René Descartes, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, among others. He’s studied chaos theory, string theory, quantum mechanics and nuclear science. Along the way, he’s also devoured popular fiction and classic literature — Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and most of the works of William Shakespeare (“Not all of them,” he notes, modestly). He has a younger brother, Michael, 10, and the two boys are especially close, his mother said.

   Gabriel has a laser focus on math and science, but the UW’s Robinson Center program for early-entrance students — those younger than 15 — is not a good fit because he has already skipped over so much undergraduate work, his dad says. “Keeping him engaged is critical, and so far, reasonably successful,” said William Monahan, Gabriel’s Advanced Placement (AP) biology teacher at Eastlake High. In elementary school, Gabriel was placed in the district’s program for highly capable students, but it wasn’t until third grade that the adults around him started to realize the depths of his intellectual abilities. At age 8, he began teaching himself calculus and physics from sources he found on the Internet. Curious to know how much he was learning, his parents signed him up for the SAT; he scored a 720 out of 800 on the math portion, placing him in the 95th percentile for college-bound high-school students. That score plus Gabriel’s math notations — he had written out pages and pages of solutions to math and physics problems — sent the Sees to Elizabeth Sirjani, who was then the math chair at Eastlake. She confirmed that Gabriel had taught himself AP-level math and physics work on his own. “We started scrambling then,” said Phelan, of the Lake Washington district’s accelerated program. Gabriel began taking math and science at Eastlake, while remaining in elementary school for music, gym class, recess and library. When he was 9, he joined Monahan’s biology class, a college-level course usually taken by high-school juniors and seniors. Too small to see what was going on while sitting in a regular chair, Gabriel often ended up perched on a table, his short legs swinging in space, Monahan said. By November, he had finished reading the AP biology textbook on his own. He grasped the science quicker than students twice his age, and when it was time to do a biology lab, “he would get in there and tell the seniors, ‘Let me get it done,’ ” Monahan said. “It’s been, almost at every turn in the road, a unique experience,” he added. “It’s like a beautiful mind — we’re talking about something that’s pretty unique here.” His teachers say Gabriel is capable of digesting and storing information in great gulps, and then making connections with other things he had already learned. “Everything I threw at him, he just got,” said Melissa Nivala, who was a graduate student in the applied math department at the UW in 2007 when she began tutoring Gabriel in graduate-level math. “And he loved it. We would work until I was mentally exhausted. I would tell him, ‘OK, we need to stop, because I’m tired of thinking.’ “ Nivala would give Gabriel a textbook on a subject — say, chaos theory — and Gabriel would read the book in a few days. He could then answer specific questions and open-ended questions on the subject. He even remembered the exact page number in the book where certain formulas first appeared, Nivala said, hinting at a eidetic memory. For any parent whose child has unusual intellectual gifts, finding the right program is a challenge; for Gabriel’s parents, it’s been that process on steroids. In 2008, Jason See found a way for Gabriel to do research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. And in 2009, he persuaded professors in the UW’s Department of Bioengineering to let Gabriel join a team that was assembling an entry for MIT’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition for undergraduates. Jason See keeps a thick folder, filled with letters of recommendation from professors, test scores and transcripts, to help reinforce the somewhat hard-to-fathom story of his son’s accomplishments. “Gabriel’s dad is a pretty good advocate for him,” Phelan said. The iGEM competition has been Gabriel’s most public success, and it’s what caught the eye of Popular Science’s editors. “We originally had some other undergraduates interested in the project,” said postdoctoral student Sean Sleight. “He (Gabriel) pretty much intimidated them, because he was so brilliant. We kind of joke that he did more in one summer than a team of undergraduates.” With occasional help from bioengineering professor Herbert Sauro, Gabriel built a prototype model of a robot that could disperse small amounts of fluid into a plate of 96 wells. The greatest challenge was getting the robot to make tiny, precise movements in space — requiring Gabriel to puzzle out math formulas, and then write original computer programming that would allow the robot to move in three dimensions. Gabriel is quick to point out that he wasn’t successful right away: “The first one failed mostly because it was unstable.” The project required him to do three-dimensional trigonometry, which “is not elementary stuff — you do that in university,” Sauro said. “And he worked it out himself.” The project won a silver medal. “There was quite a bit of buzz that year at iGEM,” Sleight said. “Here’s this 11-year-old that turns everything on its head.” Gabriel’s machine could be built for about $750, much less than the $10,000 price tag for such machines, which would make it more affordable to startup companies and small universities. Because the interface is not user-friendly, though, it’s not a product that could be built for the mass market, Sauro said. Still, it hints at Gabriel’s potential — an intellect so powerful already that he can see unique solutions, or possibly find ways around problems that stump other researchers. “Maybe nobody will ever stamp his diploma, but he will be doing research that far exceeds what most people can comprehend,” Monahan said. "He’ll probably find a cure for cancer,” Sleight said. “Or something bigger.”

Super Humans - Evan Ehrenberg

   Evan Ehrenberg, born in 1993, at age 16 started a PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department studying computational neuroscience. Graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. degree in cognitive science with an emphasis in computational modeling, highest honors, at age 16. Won the Robert J. Glushko Prize for distinguished undergraduate research in cognitive science at age 16 for his research on a 'Layered sparse associative network for soft pattern classification and contextual pattern completion". Evan Ehrenberg grew up in California, and received his bachelors degree in cognitive science and computational modeling from UC Berkeley. Now a PhD student in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Evan pursues research in computational neuroscience, attempting to describe how our brains operate using mathematical algorithms. Evan's thesis focuses on how the human brain learns to detect and recognize all of the faces we encounter in our day-to-day lives, with the hope that it will improve state-of-the-art computer vision and artificial intelligence. Evan was excited to join the Sinha lab at MIT not only for their work in vision science and psycho-physics, but also for their work abroad in India named Project Prakash, in which children with curable blindness are provided free surgery to grant them sight. Evan has been involved with the MIT+K12 program since the original video round, and has focused on educating the general public on how their brains work.

   I found funny and very interesting that he teach Star Wars related courses (about SW universe, but also about basic light-saber combat and not only). Maybe i will check some of them soon. 

Super Humans - Colin Carlson

Colin Carlson (born 1996), enrolled at the University of Connecticut at age 12, earned a bachelor's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology and another in environmental studies (2012) and a master's degree in the same subject (2013) at the University of Connecticut, at age 15 and 16 respectively. He plans to earn his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and a degree in environmental law for a career in conservation science. He intends to earn the two degrees by age 22. Carlson is currently PhD student in the Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at University of California, Berkeley. At age of 19, he is mentioned in Forbes 30 under 30 in 2016. They say about him that "Carlson is already famous for graduating college at 15, but this “prodigy” isn’t content to rest on that achievement. The focus of his research? Parasites. And more particularly, how parasites–which are key to many ecosystems–will be impacted by climate change, an understudied aspect of ecology." Probably will will hear his name more in the following years.