He ain’t no Ramanujan, or a Terrence Tao or any of the recent Fields’ medalists who have poured their heart and soul into their craft with no expected financial return.
"prodigy" - extraordinary - derives from Latin: prodigium.
1. It means just means highly talented.
2. Some who accomplishes/performs something rare/unusual/novel.
I tend to go with number two as well, but for instance if you look at the etymology its roots are more in the first definition.[1]
This is rather strong evidence for the statement that "ordinary people" are often not qualified to judge whether someone is a genius or not.
The guy was a math prodigy though. What else would you call one of the top math students at cambridge?
> He ain’t no Ramanujan, or a Terrence Tao or any of the recent Fields’ medalists who have poured their heart and soul into their craft with no expected financial return.
You don't have to win the Fields' medal or achieve greatness to be a prodigy. There are plenty of prodigies who fail to live up to their potential or simply choose to do other things.
It's not just in academics. There are sports prodigies who, for a variety of reasons, fail to achieve greatness.
Take baseball. For every ken griffey jr, there are a bunch of brien taylors. For every lebron, you have a greg oden or kwame brown.
I would call him a good, hardworking student. (At least that's what we'd call it in Singapore ;) Coincidentally me and Xu went to high school at the same time in Singapore)
If we labelled everyone who did well in the undergraduate curriculum as prodigal - the word itself starts loses its meaning.
Let's take the top 20 universities across the world (harvards,mits, tsinghuas, iits etc.) and take the top 10 graduating students from each class (math, physics, etc.) => are we saying that the world is producing 500-1000 prodigies every year?
How many singaporeans are top math students at cambridge? If hard work is all that it took, we'd all be studying math at cambridge.
> Coincidentally me and Xu went to high school at the same time in Singapore)
"Coincidentally Xu and I..."
> Let's take the top 20 universities across the world (harvards,mits, tsinghuas, iits etc.) and take the top 10 graduating students from each class (math, physics, etc.) => are we saying that the world is producing 500-1000 prodigies every year?
I'd say there are far more prodigies than that being produced every year. You do realize that there are 7 billion people on earth right?
You don't have to be newton or einstein to be a prodigy. Most prodigies never live up to their expectations. Maybe you use the word differently in singapore than in the US.