From Pi to Puzzles: continued fraction of pi new record by a 13 years old | Hacker News Reader

From Pi to Puzzles: continued fraction of pi new record by a 13 years old

blog.wolfram.com

99 pointspixdamix16 comments

This kid is such a stud. I had the honor of meeting him at a conference a few years ago when he was only 11 or 12. He answered questions about math like an intelligent grad student, conveying his own ideas in fully grammatical sentences without ums or ahs. It was as if he were reading from a textbook on the subject that he had written. One of the presenters called him on stage and tried to tease him a bit, but he was utterly un-phased by it, and gave intelligent, straightforward replies.

Have you heard Knuth speak? He's full of "um's" and "ah's".

(Neil is fantastic; I only brought it up because I'm someone who uses a lot of "um's" and "ah's", which tends to give people the impression that I'm dim. So it gave me hope to find out that even the great Knuth suffers from it too.)

Isn't Knuth 150 years old though?

The point is that Neil's normal, extemporaneous speech achieves a degree of economy, accuracy and information-richness that most of us can only approach in writing, and then only after careful editing.

The blog post referenced by this article (http://nbickford.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/pi/) is amazing. It's not just the math and not just the C# code; he throws in all sorts of offhand references to a paper here, a record-holder there, a plot point of Carl Sagan's Contact... the kinds of things that most people accumulate over many years. While this isn't high-level mathematics, if I'd read the post without seeing the Wolfram story, I'd have guessed the author to be a 30+ year old enthusiast.

Seriously. Now read this: http://nbickford.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/what-ive-been-work...

It would be cool if Wolfram could write about this kid without trying to subvert his accomplishments into an advertorial for mathematica.

It's bad enough that he passes his employees results off as his own (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cook), to try to take indirect credit for this kids' achievements is disgusting.

Yeah, it's almost like blog.wolfram.com is just a promotional tool for Wolfram Research. Actually, that's exactly what it is.

This blog is not pretending to be an unbiased information source on mathematics or computer algebra software. If you want that, go elsewhere.

Call me cynical but this reads more like a promotional piece for Mathematica than it does praise for the kid.

It's bad enough that I think it calls into question the legitimacy of this whole situation.

You're cynical. In Mathematica.

Neil is cool and fun. Like bumbledraven I met Neil at a conference early in 2010. He (Neil) is still clearly just pre-teen, but at the same time his knowledge and abilities are awesome.

And he's nice too.

I accept the article was a bit heavy on Mathematica references, but material like this is really useful in teaching!

Mathematica does represent a considerable investment, and they are maintaining wolframalpha for free use.

Continued fractions are fascinating; however, I think they fell through the curriculum cracks: deemed a bit advanced for high school and too elementary for college level.

Neil appears to be extremely intelligent; however, I think this is also testament that great intuitive tools lead to great achievements.

I think they get covered in number theory courses.

Here's a blog post from his mom talking about him from two years ago. At the time he was corresponding with Bill Gosper (founder of the hacking community according to Wikipedia)

http://www.daftmusings.com/2009/05/14/neil-and-the-julia-rob...

I'm 18 and I feel so old.

Awesome work, kid .... I mean.... Sir!

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