Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jerrrry | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any resources to best optimize (or at least not squander) a young genius's opportunity, especially in math?

My son (just turning 7) is smarter than I am; and possibly more as an artifact of being on the spectrum, is nearly bored after textual representations ( one tredecillion, ten tredecillion...), ~70 digits of pi, latin/greek alphabet, periodic table, planets/cosmos, and every other aspect of rote memorable/science/math things.

I'm not sure if he's bored now, or simply too busy with trying to learn to read, or burnt out, but I've tried to look for more collegiate material that may suit him, besides looking ahead 4-5 school years, and come up rather short. Some private tutoring material has seemed most helpful, but so far, YouTube has the best material, but obviously that has its own issues.

Besides more moderated Youtube/Kids, i fear im missing something obvious

View on HN

I (as noted in another comment: Dove's husband and the father of the child in question) homeschool him. My wife and I both have graduate math-related degrees. We let him pretty much run wild with independent math research, while also making a point to probe for weaknesses -- last year I gave him the tests from some MIT Opencourseware calculus courses and about twice per year-of-calculus we ran into something he hadn't learned and spent a couple days working it up. On the future agenda is Gilbert Strang's linear algebra course, since there are full lectures online and everything.

What we did in past years was, largely, giving him unfettered access to math and math-related channels on youtube. Vi Hart, Numberphile, 3blue1brown, stuff like that. When he showed interest in something specific, we'd get him appropriate materials. Since his elementary school was a public montessori school, his teachers encouraged us to send him with appropriate math workbooks for his capability level.

I envy today's generation and their free access to high quality maths resources haha

yes but they're missing the take-the-radio-apart or take-the-computer-apart or fit-whole-instruction-set-in-one's-head advantage that earlier eras were granted.

Maybe. Those things can still be taught.

"What if there is no Internet?" No computer? Etc...

Papa (grandfather now, raising my granddaughter because... not important, lol) tends to impress the young ones with what can be done with what is in one's head.

I am hopeful. But maybe also naive.

The other idea I like to link to these skills is "thought is action" type mastery. And, just to be clear, that is a state of clarity coupled with having grokked[0] something valuable.

Having realized that state many times in my past makes it easier today. I can go there and perform, doing or dealing with whatever it is efficiently and effectively.

It also can mean agency where ones peers may well lack it.

[0] - ...having achieved a state of understanding so complete it is a part of us, who we are, automatic, almost instinct.

The take things apart has become obfuscated by modern technology design. Most devices these days just drop one of a dozen chips into a circuit board as it's brains. Program it, and then ship it. More or less black boxing the device. It's one of the reasons the supply chain hit a lot of tech hard, those few chips were low cost and plentiful ... Until the knock on effects of the supply chain issues happened and they weren't as profitable to make compared to the high prices chips companies like auto manufacturers were bulk ordering for a premium.

Fascinating few years, a whole generation of designs rendered unusable - complete designs trying to be reworked for the chips they could get a hold of.

In my day all we had was Martin Gardiner, and that was only once a month!!

13 year old also has "Mathematical Carnival" on his shelf.

My state runs a virtual school online that offers a lot of math classes. That's what my son did all through the middle grades since he was above what was normally offered at the school. This allowed him to do the AP classes for calc and such in high school early and then do college levels of math later in high school. You can definitely do more home school or khan academy stuff as an alternative or in conjunction, but the nice thing about the virtual school is it's state run and certified just like any other public school, so the classes have no problem being added to the transcripts with his normal classes.

www.houseofmath.com might be fun

Reply on news.ycombinator.com