> Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree.
Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
TrackerFF · 3h ago
I see your point, but undergraduate degrees should provide a wide foundation, with little specialization. As you progress to a masters degree, you become more specialized. A doctorate is as specialized as it gets.
It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. Even to such a degree that they can write a doctorate on it.
But I don't think that's a good excuse to make them forego other curriculum, especially if it is required for other students to take. Schools have a responsibility to educate people to a certain standard, and give them some general breadth.
thrawa8387336 · 1h ago
No, that was the purpose of high school. As not practiced in public schools, as not practiced in the US
Aurornis · 38m ago
> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it.
I’m not suggesting this person is doing anything fraudulent as she seems quite impressive.
However, educational institutions get constant requests from parents who want their children to skip far ahead before they’re ready. It’s a competitive world and they know that being able to claim a child skipped several grades or even skipped undergrad entirely is a unique and very impressive achievement for the resume. It also theoretically provides a few additional years of earning potential by giving a career head start.
The first problem is that many of these parents (again, no accusations for this specific case) see this and want to make it happen for their child at any cost. There are some wild stories about parents trying to cheat their kids forward or falsifying their accomplishments to try to skip grades.
The secondary problem is that it can be hard on kids to be thrust forward so far past their peers. I had several friends who skipped a grade in middle school and most of them didn’t have a great experience for social reasons. Skipping undergrad altogether would thrust someone into a foreign world with a lot of baseline expectations and norms that they hadn’t yet learned, combined with no peers their age to discuss it with.
It creates a high chance for burnout or failure, which could leave them worse off than when they started.
That’s why the recommendation is generally to do undergrad at a challenging institution that allows students some upward mobility in specific areas where they’re ahead. No reasonable undergrad program is going to have this person taking Algebra 101, but there are a lot of opportunities for them to jump right into advanced programs and go deep and broad.
thechao · 3h ago
In my teens I worked with the statistics department at UTMB. That had a cast of characters there; many profs in the 70s and 80s, who'd gotten their degrees before WW2. A number of them had schooling of the form:
Start school at 9-10, do 5 years of public school, got to a 1 year prep, do a year or two of college, do a two year PhD. Most of them had their PhD's by 22.
skeptrune · 3h ago
I think the biggest flaw with higher education today is that we're pushing people into doing undergraduate degrees who are already well beyond coming out of self learning from high school or other experiences.
Aurornis · 52m ago
The number of high schoolers who might be ready to go into postgrad programs is very small.
There is no way this could be the “biggest flaw” in higher education today because the number of people possibly impacted is so tiny.
Although I think you’re striking at something that is a real problem with undergraduate degrees today: Many universities have become so watered down and softened that students spend the first 1-2 years doing what they should have been learning in high school.
My friends who still teach at university constantly complain about students arriving for undergrad with very poor writing, communication, and listening skills.
jonhohle · 3h ago
That’s one of the biggest problems? Not pushing people into higher educational programs with little societal or economic value but huge loads of debt?
franga2000 · 1h ago
The debt part is just a US thing, but the rest of us still have the other problems.
skeptrune · 3h ago
I think research and higher education does have value for the most part. It's undergrad that's really worthless and something people only do for the experience.
psyklic · 2h ago
Undergrads who care about learning and research will take the most challenging classes, do research with professors, and surround themselves with other strong students who will push them.
Even at top universities, very very few freshmen are capable of doing high-quality research immediately. They'd be better served learning the foundations inside and out with a cohort of similarly strong students to challenge them.
cge · 47m ago
To agree with you: I've worked with several really brilliant undergrads doing and publishing great research. But all of them were rightfully undergrads. Even if they were actually capable of doing great research, they benefited from the breadth.
If you have bright enough undergrads, you change the curriculum for them within their field of expertise, so that they still get the breadth of things outside it while not wasting time with things they know. You let them not take as many classes, take graduate courses, do more research, take more courses from other departments in related areas but with different perspectives, and so on.
When I was an undergrad, in physics, there was a professor in the department who had done his undergrad there and was legendary, as was quietly mentioned in awe, for not taking any undergraduate physics courses while there; the department had let him skip all of them, and instead take graduate courses and do research.
skeptrune · 2h ago
If you do research during your 4 year undergrad. You shouldn't have been undergrad. It's really that simple.
psyklic · 1h ago
I'm not sure that's a simple argument and can't imagine many would agree.
Undergrads who do research generally aren't very good at research yet. A major reason is they either lack or don't fully understand the pre-reqs, which they progressively and cumulatively learn during undergrad. A student can be incredibly smart, but acquiring a strong rigorous math background will still take years.
dh2022 · 1h ago
About pre-reqs: third and fourth year PureMath classes at UofWaterloo consisted of math I already took in HighSchool in Romania: group theory, ring theory. Plus some calculus I already read in high school out of curiosity: measure theory and the Lebesgue integral. Another Romanian guy at UofW was auditing 4th year classes while in his first year (he is now a math professor at an American university)
I can see a committed and gifted student being able to get most of the pre-reqs for doctoral studies in America or Canada while in high school.
skeptrune · 1h ago
Working on that skill and ability is the entire point of postgrad. If those are the skills you're working on then you should be in a postgrad program.
psyklic · 1h ago
If you don't know the foundations well, you don't belong in a postgrad program. That's the reality and how it currently works. Undergrad teaches you those foundations.
Anyone can try doing research, even undergrads who half-know the foundations. However, trying research doesn't mean you have the background to do great research or to succeed in a postgrad program.
skeptrune · 1h ago
Let me ammend my statement. *"Anyone who succeeds at publishing research deserves to be in a postgrad program."
Plenty of people in postgrad programs don't know the foundations. It's ok. You are there to learn.
Completely unfair to expect someone already doing research to slog out 4yrs of classes not furthering their career.
Quekid5 · 1h ago
People sometimes accidentally do research. I'm not joking.
xp84 · 2h ago
Indeed. I've long felt that most undergrad students would be better served by a typical college minus the formal classes. Basically dorms and all the other amenities found in a typical college campus, where you mainly gain life skills and mingle with other people your age. Because most people I met at an average 4-year school were there because it's a societal expectation among certain classes, it's less scary than just getting a job and figuring out life completely on your own, and it is 10x-100x easier to make friends at college than just "out in the world." Not on the list: to learn from college classes, which at an average school teach you less than you'd get from a $200 a year subscription to Great Courses Plus or Brilliant. Or free from Khan Academy.
I know a few very special schools give undergrads access to brilliant minds in their field, but I also have been told that undergrads at those schools are mostly taught by grad students, so I'm not sure that Ivies provide a lot either, beyond the opportunity to hobnob with the legacies that will be running Goldman Sachs in 20 years.
conorbergin · 1h ago
Very few people are too “advanced” to be challenged by a sufficiently difficult undergraduate degree, ridiculous thing to say imho, I went to a UK university this decade and I can give you a laundry list of issues more significant than “exceptional students being slowed down”.
TheOtherHobbes · 53m ago
This woman is undoubtedly exceptional. But we don't know how exceptional, because she's an outlier, educated using different methods.
We have no idea how many other people would achieve something similar with a similar background. Personally I'd bet almost anything it's a larger number than most people expect.
I'd also be surprised if she doesn't already have a pretty solid background in undergrad-level math.
The irony is she's actually more typical than not. Universities in the past were open to giving unusual talents special treatment.
Historically, the idea that everyone must follow the same path on the same timetable is unusual.
contravariant · 3h ago
To the right people a university education can be an asset rather than a barrier to entry.
assword · 3h ago
> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
There’s a modern phenomenon I’ve been thinking about but have struggled to put a name to.
Everything just becomes so generalized, streamlined that it becomes impossible to operate outside of the pre defined “happy path”.
AI will make this increase 100x as taking humans out of the loop seems to accelerate this process.
ninala · 2h ago
Perhaps the term "canalization" fits? Coined by C.H. Waddington, describing the process of forming a chreode in a homeorhetic system. But it doesn't really encompass the "everything becomes overly generalized" concept you mentioned. Rather, it's more about robustness against perturbation of a trajectory in a conceptual space. Christopher Alexander called them 'paths in configuration space'.
pinewurst · 4h ago
The interesting part is that two others admitted her but retracted after "higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions".
Was she not considered properly conditioned?
terminalshort · 32m ago
Of course she was, but that's not what this is about. Letting her in proves that the bureaucratic credentials offered by schools are meaningless. The university system in its present form in the US is entirely predicated on the fiction that those credentials actually mean something and are worth paying six figures for.
MathMonkeyMan · 3h ago
"I'm in charge, I enforce the rules, I'm a big deal."
general1726 · 4h ago
Hey, you are not getting your degree without paying for it.
JohnKemeny · 1h ago
> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
The purpose of a PhD is not writing a dissertation. It is a research school, and I'm sure she could still learn a thing or two about research (and teaching).
whatshisface · 3h ago
Two out of ten is pretty good for anything involving individual decisions, just ask any salesperson.
Quekid5 · 1h ago
That's a nice quip, but aren't degrees meant to offer breadth of knowledge? (I'm sure she has lots, but perhaps is weak in other areas.)
rahkiin · 4h ago
Normally you have a master of science as well. And for that you require a bachelors. So to do it directly you need to do it all at once?
morleytj · 4h ago
In the US a doctorate usually doesn't require a master's, most people go straight from undergrad to phd.
sdenton4 · 2h ago
To add slightly more detail:
Most research math programs in the US are 5(ish) year 'combined' masters+phd programs. The first couple years are basically course work, seminars, finding your area and advisor, and then the rest is the actual research work. It's not uncommon to leave after the first couple years with a Master's degree.
TheRealPomax · 3h ago
Conversely: if that's all it takes, there is no point in going to University just to get a piece of paper that says "you did the thing you already did".
University (for folks serious about continuing in academia after) is (obviously) about making sure you have the same base knowledge as everyone else, but also for you to come to terms with how academia actually works, who the bad players are, who the good players are, and who you need to know to get shit to happen for you. So in that sense, most Universities going "no" is literally the most accurate reflection of what life's going to be like on a continuous basis on the inside.
JAlexoid · 3h ago
This is ignoring the value of the whole education process, that you go through the years at a university.
I disagree that she should skip the general education.
xp84 · 2h ago
Thinking about my GE requirements at undergrad, I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her. She has but one lifetime, and can contribute much to her field.
The subjects such as English composition, she should be allowed to test out of if she is already a good writer.
com2kid · 51m ago
> I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her.
This is a common STEM view, but it is inherently wrong. IMHO it dates back to the unfortunate divide between science and the liberal arts, whereas both were once considered a single field, now days there is disdain and mistrust between the two sides.
The point of history classes isn't to memorize the dates of wars, is it to understand the motivations of humans, it is to understand how the world we lived in has been shaped throughout time, and it is to learn how to do, and understand, research about the history of a place.
The point of English classes isn't just to get good at writing, it is to get good at various types of writing, it is to learn how to read different forms of literature, and it is to have a guided tour through a chosen selection of literature to hopefully develop one's character and thoughtfulness.
One of the most valuable classes I ever took at University was the Art Of Listening To Music. We started off around 500ad or so and went forward through time up until about 1920. We learned the vocabulary of music, how to sit down and listen to a piece of music and describe what we were hearing. After I was done with the class I went from appreciating a handfuls of genres of music to appreciating music itself no matter the genre. It was a 3 credit guaranteed A class that had enriched my life by an enormous amount.
If you really love your major, then the point of going to university was NOT your major, odds are you would've studied that field with or without the school. (Barring fields that require large capital investments, chemistry, physics, playing with an entire orchestra, building airplanes, etc) The point is everything else.
terminalshort · 20m ago
But that isn't how it works in reality, at least in the US. In reality, outside of their major (and sometimes inside it too), students usually pick the absolute easiest classes that satisfy the requirements. The ones that are known that the teacher doesn't take attendance are heavily desired. And the university is happy to oblige. Departments are funded based on a formula of how many students are in their classes, and they know that if they gain a reputation for being hard, students won't take their classes for GE requirements. It's a race to the bottom. So most departments offer enormous 1 level classes with 200 students taught with minimal rigor, and where you really only have to study a few days before the final to collect your A. And on top of that the frats all keep collections of graded tests from every class for years past, so basically anyone who wants to cheat is able to do so easily. This isn't education. This isn't worth six figures.
com2kid · 1m ago
[delayed]
jackero · 3h ago
50% of my college education was general education though.
And frankly I find it just as valuable.
nurettin · 2h ago
> what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
Prodigy skips undergrad -> Universities are doomed? What?
impish9208 · 3h ago
“There was this inescapable sameness, in a way. No matter what I did, I was in the same place doing mostly the same things,” she said. “I was very isolated, and nothing I could do could really change that. I’d wake up on certain days and realize, I’m just older.”
I finally have something in common with a math prodigy.
munificent · 33m ago
Thank God she found math instead of Factorio.
debo_ · 42m ago
Her notes are so clear and so artfully wrought! I wonder if learning from online resources makes one naturally focus more on presentation.
As a pupil of Dijkstra and seeing at least some rise in formal verification because of the modern tooling and as a follower of Lean (and Agda, Coq, Idris* etc), I hope it will be at least a strive to deliver parts of proofs in code verifiable form. More machine verifiable building blocks will lead to a bettering of everything.
Imustaskforhelp · 2h ago
Offtopic, but I am 17 too just like Hannah Cairo but nothing too groundbreaking till now I suppose and it absolutely brings me delight that I can talk to somebody who was a pupil of Dijkstra,
I have heard a lot about dijkstra's algorithm's and I had forgotten about it and so I searched it right now, but the only thing I knew is that it is pretty popular algorithm.
If I had to ask you kind sir, what would be the biggest life lesson (in coding, or anything general) that you could give me be?
AlanYx · 1h ago
It's wonderful that Khan Academy played a role in enriching her early education. It's proving to be a solid resource across the spectrum of math ability.
rossant · 11m ago
Amazing story on a no-less amazing teenager.
Also, I love the handwritten slide on one of the photos. Very nice.
shermantanktop · 3h ago
- moved between countries or first/second gen immigrant? check
- home schooled? check
This on top of her extraordinary talent and hard work. Institutional education truly is a great leveler, at both the top and bottom.
Not only she did grow in Bulgaria during the most turbolent times of regime change from communism to democracy, but later graduates with a PHD from Harvard, and later becomes Director and Founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, and is also organizer of math competitions in Bay Area, and publisher of what seems to be a complete set of Math Books, carefully crafted with her peers from BG and presented here
Curious whether miss Cairo was a student of hers or is to be.
AtlasBarfed · 5h ago
”Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions."
This is both unsurprising and shocking to me at the same time.
For institutions of allegedly pure higher learning in a field where it's known that youth is where the advancement happens, the fact 80% axle wrap over a piece of paper that, let's face it, in modern times of grade inflation is pretty much worthless of anything beyond money and sitting in a seat for four years.
kurthr · 4h ago
A lot of programs don't want to have to babysit a teenager no matter how talented they are. Some of the more prestigious programs both have some experience with it and extra staff to (give profs warm fuzzies) handle any issues that come up. I'd expect it depends a lot on her interests and the particular professors that study that at any particular institution.
Even as a student, I'd be more interested in which professors at Johns Hopkins were accepting students, than which school.
xandrius · 4h ago
As if that was the reason.
Also, I've seen a great deal of adult babies in academia, so let's not be ageist here.
neilv · 4h ago
> Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions.
I've personally seen universities go both ways, and it comes down both to individuals, and to the culture of the department/university faculty and administration.
(Not to the culture of the student body, which is influenced by the administration culture, but has very little institutional memory, and almost zero power. If you draw an analogy to nations, there might be one with the most awful 'leaders' seizing and abusing power, but that's "way above the pay grade" of the many nice citizens you will meet -- who didn't know what they were being born into, and will do their best to be decent to each other, despite whatever bits they're unfortunate to learn about the upper powers.)
gus_massa · 4h ago
In my university, when someone is accepted as a graduate student of a different topic (let's say phisics -> biology) it's usual to include a few of the last courses of the major as a mandatory part of the Ph.D.
zavg · 2h ago
This is the most impressive thing I've seen in years.
I find the Soviet idea of Math Circles so interesting and important. I bought books on the subject, but it's difficult to implement for your own children only. Nothing beats it like having an actual one, run by math teachers and in your city.
conferza · 3h ago
Wow, this is remarkable. So inspiring to read, even though I'm terrible at mathematics.
hadlock · 5h ago
A less click-baity headline might be "17 year old Hannah Cairo has solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture"
spiderxxxx · 1h ago
There's so many photos of just her staring off into the distance, and only one photo with her presenting the actual thing that she's supposedly famous for. I don't get the point of just all these random photos of this girl.
azornathogron · 33m ago
It's not very easy to take photos of mathematics, and the girl is the central subject of the article anyway. What images would you expect to see?
noqc · 4h ago
probably add "in the negative", to that.
1024core · 4h ago
"17 year old Hannah Cairo has disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture"
sdenton4 · 2h ago
Is it an important conjecture, or just something someone came up with last week?
cgh · 2h ago
This is answered in the article’s second paragraph.
sdenton4 · 11m ago
But I don't know that from the proposed re-titling of the article. The importance of the conjecture is more salient for the general reader than the (uninformative) names of the people who conjectured in the first place.
OutOfHere · 5h ago
What is the general basis for skipping college and getting admission directly in a Ph.D. program? What does one have to generally do to qualify?
ameliaquining · 5h ago
AFAIK there's no general procedure; it's just that the admissions committee can admit anyone whom they're convinced can do Ph.D.-level work, and that almost always involves getting an undergraduate degree first but in extremely exceptional cases it might not.
pinewurst · 4h ago
I knew someone who was admitted to a Masters program at Stanford sans undergraduate degree. His employer at the time was a large donor.
TMWNN · 4h ago
For context, Stephen Wolfram dropped out of Eton to start at Oxford, then was admitted to Caltech's physics PhD before finishing his Oxford BA, receiving his doctorate at the age of 21.
(He was publishing papers in high school.)
oldpersonintx2 · 4h ago
be actually gifted
this is what gifted looks like, not legions of students who are told they are "gifted" but are just pretty smart
joe_the_user · 5h ago
Essentially, you have to convince a math professor that you able to complete the Ph.D program. There are a variety of ways to do that. Solving a major open conjuncture is clearly one of them but just getting to know one or another professors can work (I went to school with the semi-famous Paul Lockhart who also did this).
fnord77 · 2h ago
Wait, what software engineering jobs require you to move to the Bahamas?
smithkl42 · 1h ago
Insurance is a pretty common one. Lots of insurance companies have offices there - and if you're a top-notch dev, you can make a crap-ton of money as well.
cgh · 2h ago
In my experience, online gambling or banking.
carabiner · 4h ago
I hope she doesn't burn out and move into the woods like Grothendieck, Kaczynski,
gspencley · 4h ago
I have yet to move into the woods but, given my current levels of burnout, I think such a proposition is highly underrated. What's wrong with moving into the woods?
Wait, if everyone moves into the woods there will be no more woods that offer seclusion. Yeah moving into the woods is awful! I hope she doesn't burn out!
bee_rider · 3h ago
One option could be to get a hammock and go program in a tree. That’s sort of like moving to the woods, but you don’t have to live there full time and you still get to program.
laurent_du · 2h ago
Kaczynski was really not on the same level. By several orders of magnitude.
amelius · 4h ago
What I'd like to know is how many 17 year olds failed to solve their math mystery, and chose a career in programming instead.
geodel · 3h ago
Almost all of them?
kevinventullo · 3h ago
Many people who succeed in solving their math mystery still end up choosing a career in programming
1659447091 · 3h ago
I never got excited for math, thus didn't care much to start with. But then add the issues of high school math and that solidified it for me. Math word problems were the worst. With a dyslexic brain I would consistently read the important words as something different, thus correctly solving the wrong problem and being derided for it.
Geometry required rote memory exceptionalism which also works against my brain design (adhd as well), but let me have the formulas to choose from and I'll get it done. Algebra II? I kept getting in trouble because I would do homework assignments in class instead of paying attention to the teacher trying to teach concepts that were easier for me to learn by reading the examples and following the book. After that, who would ever want to continue beyond the required credits and not think of further math as a masochist hellscape
Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.
She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!
It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. Even to such a degree that they can write a doctorate on it.
But I don't think that's a good excuse to make them forego other curriculum, especially if it is required for other students to take. Schools have a responsibility to educate people to a certain standard, and give them some general breadth.
> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it.
I’m not suggesting this person is doing anything fraudulent as she seems quite impressive.
However, educational institutions get constant requests from parents who want their children to skip far ahead before they’re ready. It’s a competitive world and they know that being able to claim a child skipped several grades or even skipped undergrad entirely is a unique and very impressive achievement for the resume. It also theoretically provides a few additional years of earning potential by giving a career head start.
The first problem is that many of these parents (again, no accusations for this specific case) see this and want to make it happen for their child at any cost. There are some wild stories about parents trying to cheat their kids forward or falsifying their accomplishments to try to skip grades.
The secondary problem is that it can be hard on kids to be thrust forward so far past their peers. I had several friends who skipped a grade in middle school and most of them didn’t have a great experience for social reasons. Skipping undergrad altogether would thrust someone into a foreign world with a lot of baseline expectations and norms that they hadn’t yet learned, combined with no peers their age to discuss it with.
It creates a high chance for burnout or failure, which could leave them worse off than when they started.
That’s why the recommendation is generally to do undergrad at a challenging institution that allows students some upward mobility in specific areas where they’re ahead. No reasonable undergrad program is going to have this person taking Algebra 101, but there are a lot of opportunities for them to jump right into advanced programs and go deep and broad.
There is no way this could be the “biggest flaw” in higher education today because the number of people possibly impacted is so tiny.
Although I think you’re striking at something that is a real problem with undergraduate degrees today: Many universities have become so watered down and softened that students spend the first 1-2 years doing what they should have been learning in high school.
My friends who still teach at university constantly complain about students arriving for undergrad with very poor writing, communication, and listening skills.
Even at top universities, very very few freshmen are capable of doing high-quality research immediately. They'd be better served learning the foundations inside and out with a cohort of similarly strong students to challenge them.
If you have bright enough undergrads, you change the curriculum for them within their field of expertise, so that they still get the breadth of things outside it while not wasting time with things they know. You let them not take as many classes, take graduate courses, do more research, take more courses from other departments in related areas but with different perspectives, and so on.
When I was an undergrad, in physics, there was a professor in the department who had done his undergrad there and was legendary, as was quietly mentioned in awe, for not taking any undergraduate physics courses while there; the department had let him skip all of them, and instead take graduate courses and do research.
Undergrads who do research generally aren't very good at research yet. A major reason is they either lack or don't fully understand the pre-reqs, which they progressively and cumulatively learn during undergrad. A student can be incredibly smart, but acquiring a strong rigorous math background will still take years.
I can see a committed and gifted student being able to get most of the pre-reqs for doctoral studies in America or Canada while in high school.
Anyone can try doing research, even undergrads who half-know the foundations. However, trying research doesn't mean you have the background to do great research or to succeed in a postgrad program.
Plenty of people in postgrad programs don't know the foundations. It's ok. You are there to learn.
Completely unfair to expect someone already doing research to slog out 4yrs of classes not furthering their career.
I know a few very special schools give undergrads access to brilliant minds in their field, but I also have been told that undergrads at those schools are mostly taught by grad students, so I'm not sure that Ivies provide a lot either, beyond the opportunity to hobnob with the legacies that will be running Goldman Sachs in 20 years.
We have no idea how many other people would achieve something similar with a similar background. Personally I'd bet almost anything it's a larger number than most people expect.
I'd also be surprised if she doesn't already have a pretty solid background in undergrad-level math.
The irony is she's actually more typical than not. Universities in the past were open to giving unusual talents special treatment.
Historically, the idea that everyone must follow the same path on the same timetable is unusual.
There’s a modern phenomenon I’ve been thinking about but have struggled to put a name to.
Everything just becomes so generalized, streamlined that it becomes impossible to operate outside of the pre defined “happy path”.
AI will make this increase 100x as taking humans out of the loop seems to accelerate this process.
Was she not considered properly conditioned?
The purpose of a PhD is not writing a dissertation. It is a research school, and I'm sure she could still learn a thing or two about research (and teaching).
University (for folks serious about continuing in academia after) is (obviously) about making sure you have the same base knowledge as everyone else, but also for you to come to terms with how academia actually works, who the bad players are, who the good players are, and who you need to know to get shit to happen for you. So in that sense, most Universities going "no" is literally the most accurate reflection of what life's going to be like on a continuous basis on the inside.
I disagree that she should skip the general education.
The subjects such as English composition, she should be allowed to test out of if she is already a good writer.
This is a common STEM view, but it is inherently wrong. IMHO it dates back to the unfortunate divide between science and the liberal arts, whereas both were once considered a single field, now days there is disdain and mistrust between the two sides.
The point of history classes isn't to memorize the dates of wars, is it to understand the motivations of humans, it is to understand how the world we lived in has been shaped throughout time, and it is to learn how to do, and understand, research about the history of a place.
The point of English classes isn't just to get good at writing, it is to get good at various types of writing, it is to learn how to read different forms of literature, and it is to have a guided tour through a chosen selection of literature to hopefully develop one's character and thoughtfulness.
One of the most valuable classes I ever took at University was the Art Of Listening To Music. We started off around 500ad or so and went forward through time up until about 1920. We learned the vocabulary of music, how to sit down and listen to a piece of music and describe what we were hearing. After I was done with the class I went from appreciating a handfuls of genres of music to appreciating music itself no matter the genre. It was a 3 credit guaranteed A class that had enriched my life by an enormous amount.
If you really love your major, then the point of going to university was NOT your major, odds are you would've studied that field with or without the school. (Barring fields that require large capital investments, chemistry, physics, playing with an entire orchestra, building airplanes, etc) The point is everything else.
And frankly I find it just as valuable.
Prodigy skips undergrad -> Universities are doomed? What?
From the article:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Ha...
If I had to ask you kind sir, what would be the biggest life lesson (in coding, or anything general) that you could give me be?
Also, I love the handwritten slide on one of the photos. Very nice.
- home schooled? check
This on top of her extraordinary talent and hard work. Institutional education truly is a great leveler, at both the top and bottom.
I wish her the best in her coming career.
Hannah Cairo: 17-year-old teen refutes a math conjecture proposed 40 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44481441 - July 2025 (105 comments)
https://math.berkeley.edu/~stankova/
Not only she did grow in Bulgaria during the most turbolent times of regime change from communism to democracy, but later graduates with a PHD from Harvard, and later becomes Director and Founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, and is also organizer of math competitions in Bay Area, and publisher of what seems to be a complete set of Math Books, carefully crafted with her peers from BG and presented here
https://archi-math.com/
Curious whether miss Cairo was a student of hers or is to be.
This is both unsurprising and shocking to me at the same time.
For institutions of allegedly pure higher learning in a field where it's known that youth is where the advancement happens, the fact 80% axle wrap over a piece of paper that, let's face it, in modern times of grade inflation is pretty much worthless of anything beyond money and sitting in a seat for four years.
Even as a student, I'd be more interested in which professors at Johns Hopkins were accepting students, than which school.
Also, I've seen a great deal of adult babies in academia, so let's not be ageist here.
I've personally seen universities go both ways, and it comes down both to individuals, and to the culture of the department/university faculty and administration.
(Not to the culture of the student body, which is influenced by the administration culture, but has very little institutional memory, and almost zero power. If you draw an analogy to nations, there might be one with the most awful 'leaders' seizing and abusing power, but that's "way above the pay grade" of the many nice citizens you will meet -- who didn't know what they were being born into, and will do their best to be decent to each other, despite whatever bits they're unfortunate to learn about the upper powers.)
(He was publishing papers in high school.)
this is what gifted looks like, not legions of students who are told they are "gifted" but are just pretty smart
Wait, if everyone moves into the woods there will be no more woods that offer seclusion. Yeah moving into the woods is awful! I hope she doesn't burn out!
Geometry required rote memory exceptionalism which also works against my brain design (adhd as well), but let me have the formulas to choose from and I'll get it done. Algebra II? I kept getting in trouble because I would do homework assignments in class instead of paying attention to the teacher trying to teach concepts that were easier for me to learn by reading the examples and following the book. After that, who would ever want to continue beyond the required credits and not think of further math as a masochist hellscape