Advice for my math prodigy son

Ozweepay
Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:46:41 +0000

I’m a college professor at CU Boulder. My son described to me an intuitive proof that there are more irrationals between 0 and 1 than there are integers; he was 6 at the time.

Although I realize he’s unusual in his math abilities, I don’t want to send him to MIT at age 14 even if he could go. I’d rather keep him with his age group.

So this is what we do now (he’s 7):


Go on long walks in the mountains and do math problems
Play math games like Chomp
We bought a Lego Mindstorm NXT robot and program it to do silly things
Make up new games and write programs to implement them


Basically, that’s what I recommend people do with their gifted kids: spend tons of time with them, encourage them, and keep it fun. Some parents can’t do this because of time constraints, or sometimes because the child surpasses them parent in ability (!!) and when that happens I might have to rethink this.