Slashdot Mirror
Eight Year Old Physics Student Admitted to College
paris writes to tell us that The Korea Herald is running a story about Song Yoo-guen, the youngest university student that Korea has ever seen. At eight years old Song is already talking about building flying cars and defying Newton's law of gravity while others his age are attending the first grade. He completed his elementary, junior-high, and high school curricula in just nine months, something that usually takes 12 years, and has been admitted as a freshman to the physics department of Inha University.
He surprised professors by explaining the Schroedinger equation, which is of central importance to the theory of quantum mechanics.
Oh my god, to think that a 7 years old best me when it comes to learning the good old Schrodinger equation...
Someone please bury me.
8 is too young, the liver hasn't fully developed yet.
At eight years old Song is already talking about building flying cars and defying Newton's law of gravity while others his age are attending the first grade.
i was dreaming up flying cars and defying gravity in first grade. and riding dinosaurs... oh ya.
Is this worse than drafting or buying a very young sportsman? Whether you play soccer in the English Premier League at the age of 16 or you get a PhD at the age of 16 you will not be able to grow up in the same way as others, but with that kind of talent comes certain issues. If they hold him back and force him to "be his age", it will most likely severly hurt his intellectual growth.
I talked about building flying cars at the age of 6. In fact, I built one. It amazing what legos and some good old childhood imagination can do.
"The interview was conducted mainly with the senior Song since Yoo-geun is lacking in his ability to communicate with adults."
Something tells me that he might no be ready for college just yet. . .
Being socially well adjusted is overrated.
Cow Cube
I'm from India, and we have kids doing this a lot back there, especially in math. I once talked to a math professor who's met some of these kids and who actually knows what he's talking about, and he says most of the time they are not even remotely qualified to be enter university, even though they might be somewhat precocious. Usually the parents make the kid do it because they are publicity whores, and the university plays along for the same reason.
He's just getting all this school mumbo-jumbo out of the way so he can concentrate full-time on playing Starcraft once he turns 14.
The poor kid is not going to have much contact with other kids his age. I'm guessing he's going to grow up a bit anti-social and with a lack of understanding of general social rules and rituals.
- Jesse McNelis
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
From time to time we hear about such brilliant minds. But what happens when they grow up? Was anyone from here a child prodigy?
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Give a year, two max. He'll be a master StarCraft player, and all that physics education will go down the drain.
If you can find it, "The Prodigy" by Amy Wallace is an excellent one, though out of print now. It details the life of William James Sidis, who lived around the turn of the 20th century. This guy was smart beyond all fucking belief. Among other things, he was speaking at 6 months, had taught himself Latin by 3 years, spoke 7 languages fluently by 7, lectured about 4-dimensional bodies at Harvard at 11, and graduated from the same at 16. And a shitload of other such feats.
He wrote some academic papers and books under pseudonyms that went wholly unnoticed and un-cared about, even with such topics as postulating black holes well before anyone else. He never had a girlfriend. Never had sex. Never really had much in the way of friends at all. From his twenties onward he completely denied any special intelligence and only worked in manual labor types of jobs, most notably as a calculator operator, wherein he would do all of the calculations in his head and so have most of the day free. The press would openly mock him whenever they could find him.
His life's passion was collecting streetcar transfer tickets.
And the scariest part: it's non-fiction.
I'm sorry, but in what parallel dimension do they teach maturity in the school system?
In all the schools I went to, the clique-ized and institutionalized immaturity was actively supported by the teaching staff that openly favored the "popular" kids. The end result when this cancer has fully metastasized is national news stories of the football team stuffing foriegn object up the asses of other students while the coach looks on approvingly. Google on "mepham high football". And that's the best case. Worst case is Columbine.
Maybe that's teaching about the real world, but don't you dare call it maturity.
I took a course in BS Physics and I had a classmate like that. He entered University at the age of 10 direct from grade 5. His teachers noticed him sleeping most of the time in classes but when tested he knew more than his teachers. He was accelerated to a special science high school for above-average kids but after 6 months his teachers told his parents that they have nothing more to teach him. He was then sent directly to university where he was enrolled in the BS Math, BS Physics and MS Physics courses at the same time! He is good! He can compute sines and cosines in his head and can sum a taylor series without writing anything down. When he became my lab mate, we would use him as a calculator because he can compute much faster than our electronic calculators. During the time spent entering numbers on the calculator he would be able to tell us the results. We just decided to call out the numbers to him rather than have the calculator do it for us. He is a walking calculator. That was more than twenty years ago. Ever since graduating from university I have sought to find out if he has somehow made a significant contribution to physics commensurate with his abilities. After scouring newspapers and the university newsletters, I have found none. It was a disappointment. I don't know if going to university at such an early age was the right thing he did. Obviously, he was far too advanced to stay in grade 5. However, I doubt it if being forced to study in the university at his age was the right approach. He was interviewed by a newspaper once when he was my classmate. He was asked how he felt about being accelerated from grade 5 to university in less than a year. I can't forget what he said in the interview. He said he felt lonely because he has no friends in the university. All the others guys want to talk about is their girlfriends while all he wanted to do was build a paper airplane and sail it across the classroom.