by Ann Hulbert
And by extension, don’t stay the college course just because your elders want you to—or just because, in Jonathan’s unusual case, you’ve already sped along the fast track toward specialized expertise before most kids have even begun their applications. (Jobs lasted one semester, and didn’t reenroll.) On his seventeenth birthday, in the fall of 1973, his senior year, Jonathan dropped acid. He then withdrew from the term. In 1974 he left Hopkins, despite pleas from Dr. Stanley and his parents.
Convinced that “making some big change seemed necessary,” Jonathan first tried a comparatively small one. In the fall of 1974, he enrolled at MIT as a special student, planning to take the two classes he needed to finish up his Hopkins degree. He was eager to find kindred spirits. And MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab looked like a cutting-edge place to pursue graduate studies—which Joe, as it happened, had just embarked on in Cornell’s computer science department in 1973. With his B.S. and M.S.E. in hand and his eighteenth birthday in view, Joe was counting on earning his Ph.D. in two years.
But for both of Stanley’s pioneers, the superexpress academic approach had hit its limits. When Joe didn’t pass all his qualifying exams at Cornell, freezing up in part of the orals, he spent the summer paralyzed by anxiety yet clueless about the source. Insight came only with the help of a psychologist: Joe’s failure, which was how he saw it, shattered his self-image and left him feeling judged, convinced his parents and friends no longer loved him. Stanley, with whom the Bates family spent some time at the beach that summer, joined others in reassuring Joe that nobody counted on faster progress than he, Joe, wanted. Radical acceleration was meant to be an experiment, not a daunting set of expectations. Inclined at first to leave Cornell, Joe decided to carry on at a slower pace. Jonathan didn’t last at MIT. Turned off by the academic politics, he said, he dropped out as the spring semester of 1975 arrived. Flouting credentials, though haunted by the sense that he needed to make some contribution, Jonathan quit with just one more course left to fulfill his B.A.
As Stanley’s Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth took off in the mid-1970s, his first two specimens—now the age of ordinary college freshmen—weren’t quite the models he made them out to be. They were more off the charts. He had dreamed up a talent search with the goal of hastening advanced training for brilliant math minds that might otherwise get slowed down and drift off course. But the boys proved readier to set their own (unsteady) pace and direction than Stanley could have guessed when he sprang them from high school. He hadn’t foreseen the disruptive catalyst that college would offer: the computer. He didn’t figure on cultural unrest either. Joe was ambushed by the pressure of what felt more like a race than he had realized, not ideal for someone still figuring out his identity—and fixated on big ideas: his dissertation, finished by the end of the decade, explored whether machines (never mind fast-tracked boys) can be made into creative mathematicians. For Jonathan, the accelerated experience provided fodder for the sense that academia perhaps wasn’t a congenial place for intellectual rebels after all.
“An alien, a Martian plopped down,” was how Jonathan described himself in retrospect. Stanley, like Lewis Terman before him—and Boris Sidis and Leo Wiener—had hoped to rescue young math wizards from that lopsided outsider image. But what if they made it clear they didn’t exactly want or need rescuing? What if brainy nonconformity, rather than the mark of an American loser and loner, could be a sort of badge of honor—a basis for community? Other than Silicon Valley, Jonathan could hardly have plopped down in a more welcoming place than Cambridge and its environs, where cultural and technological ferment was happening well beyond tidy college quads. Martian qualities like Jonathan’s were a ticket of entry to a realm less hierarchical than the ivory tower and less hermetic than a basement.
Five decades earlier, Norbert Wiener (whose book Cybernetics claimed a spot in the Whole Earth Catalog) had found a refuge from stuffier Harvard down Massachusetts Avenue at MIT. Now Jonathan escaped from MIT to a burgeoning tech world in the Boston area in need of computer obsessives like him. He began full-time work at one of the many software companies springing up, Technology Management Incorporated (TMI)—in step with Gates, who spent the summer after his restless first year at Harvard in 1973–74 working on mainframes at nearby Honeywell. Jonathan had moved into the new Cambridge Zen Center, where studying under a Korean master “prodded me to grow up,” he said in retrospect—a tamer verdict than Jobs probably would have rendered on his meditational journeys, which since his departure from Reed had taken him to India. Yet for Jonathan, too, the “mathematical, Spartan feel” of the discipline clarified horizons. He felt poised to make “big, philosophical decisions” as he ventured forth into the real world. At TMI, he found a different rigor. Jonathan also found an exhilarating freedom on the frontier of computerized business, which offered “the room for the wild stuff,” the arena for “breaking the rules.”
Discovering his technological mission had entailed a more wayward path than Stanley had imagined. At just about the point in life when college students are expected to declare a major, Jonathan “decided that computers were where I was going to make my mark.” If the urgency to do that weighed on him, and it did, leaving the academy felt liberating. In January 1975, the new issue of Popular Electronics introduced a kit for building a personal computer called the Altair 8800: the future conjured up at the start of the decade by hacker pioneers like Alan Kay and prophet-publicists like Stewart Brand had arrived. Bzz-bzz busyness, and business, spread beyond AI labs. Prodded by Paul Allen, Gates ditched his Harvard work (to his parents’ distress). The two of them spent feverish weeks coming up with a version of BASIC that worked on the Altair. Looking at the specs for the microprocessor, Steve Wozniak got the idea for what became the Apple I, and Jobs saw the financial promise. The revolution was under way.
TMI’s province was minicomputers, newly affordable for small and midsize businesses. TMI’s superstar, it was obvious within mere months, was Jonathan. Still in his teens, he became the technical leader of a project to build one of the first electronic money transfer systems at Citibank, paving the way for automating many business processes. He was drawn to a romantic image of himself as a Tom Swift figure out of the books he had loved as a boy: a young outsider-turned-inventor transforming the world of industry. He, unlike Joe, hadn’t given Julian Stanley academic credentials to recite. Instead, Jonathan took a certain pride in not having even a high school diploma, and in 1980 he cofounded a software firm, IntraNet. He hadn’t ceased feeling lonely or worrying, as Joe did, too, “that if I made one mistake, I was ruining or dashing this incredible potential.” Yet computers, Jonathan said as he looked back, “gave my kind a way to live.”
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“By 1979 we of SMPY were nearly exhausted from our efforts,” Julian Stanley reported. He was also proudly stunned by the results. “It usually takes a viable idea twenty years to get in circulation, if it ever does,” he noted, but his talent search had spread nationwide in barely a decade. His startup was ready to go public, so to speak—thanks, as he had recognized from the outset, to a “propitious zeitgeist.” Mr. Acceleration’s real secret lay in not being too far ahead of the curve. Meritocratic pressure had been on the rise since the mid-1970s, as colleges stepped up the competition for top students, and applicants did the same for spots at top colleges. A Nation at Risk delivered a dire educational prognosis in 1983, the same year U.S. News & World Report issued the first of its annual college rankings, fuel for the escalating admissions race. Stanley’s timing was perfect when he entrusted younger colleagues at Johns Hopkins with a project: institutionalizing his enterprise.
The Center for Talent Development, as it was soon named, launched its first residential summer program in 1980. A growing array of college campuses began hosting the three-week sessions. They offered Stanley’s signature fast-paced coursework to eligible students, those who scored 500 or above on the math SAT, and now also the verbal part, before turning thirteen�
�the top one in one hundred, he estimated, of their age group. Not quite as pricey as “the typical French camp or fat camp or tennis camp,” Stanley remarked, the endeavor quickly spawned similar enterprises based at Duke, Northwestern, and the University of Denver. A new priority, overlooked in his portrayal of his radical accelerants as “stable introverts,” had emerged: to “encourage participants to be far more interactive socially.” Prodding from adults hardly seemed called for. “It was a wonder beyond any experience I might have imagined,” remembered an early summer program participant who later returned as a computer teacher, and he wasn’t referring to his blitz course in astronomy. “I was surrounded by a fellowship of geeks.”
But what about girls? That was a “hot topic,” Stanley noted with little of the enthusiasm CTYers might have expressed. He was annoyed to find the gender disparity among high math scorers attracting media attention, partly due to his own new “personal project, if not a passion”: identifying more tippy-top math stars like Jonathan and Joe, the one-in-ten-thousand rarities. While CTY administrators were adding over-500 verbal scorers for a more co-ed mix of campers, Stanley narrowed his focus to a “700–800 on SAT-M Before Age 13 Group”—which proved overwhelmingly male. By 1983, he and a collaborator had turned up a total of 260 eligible boys and 20 girls. That a gap existed came as no surprise. (The broader search, with the lower math cutoff, had turned up twice as many boys as girls.) Its size, though, delivered a jolt. Even a math-phobe could calculate the gender ratio: thirteen to one. Stanley, quite sure that innate differences were at work, didn’t appreciate the heat from the women’s movement. The fraught issues “need to be investigated by other people,” he grumbled in 1984. “I’m getting awfully tired of the strident feminist who says, ‘Why don’t you do more?’ ”
More, if that meant anointing ace math test-takers on the verge of puberty as a genius club bound for greatness, might not work so well with girls as with boys in any case. For Sergey Brin, enrolling in a CTY program the summer he turned fourteen must have seemed like an obvious step. It offered the blend of fast-track study and brainy bonding favored by his Russian-Jewish father, Michael Brin, a fierce math professor at the University of Maryland—and by Sergey, too. Six when he arrived in the United States from Moscow in 1979 with his family, he had become a cocky cut-up and computer guy by middle school, eager for any occasion to advance (and advertise) his math precocity. Brin later described himself as a beneficiary of the Montessori approach: free-range learning for kids until they turn twelve and then, “because of the hormones that boys have, you actually need to send them to do hard labor in their teens. Otherwise, their mind gets distracted.” The key was “to maintain focus, even through these difficult years,” he felt, and he joked that old-style farm work was out.
And co-ed peer fun was in, CTY administrators understood, not that they scripted it or anticipated the social dynamics. By the time Sergey signed on for his three-week dose of academic intensity in 1987, CTYers had come up with their own formula. The summer immersion featured a quirky extracurricular culture that no parent would find described in the official promotional material. A favorite ritual was a rendition of “American Pie,” followed by a group chant, “Die! Die! Die! Die! Live! Live! Live! Live! Sex! Sex! Sex! Sex! More! More! More! More!,” at the end of the weekly dances that were now part of geekdom. The zaniest campers—the guy, say, with the orange jumpsuit and outré attitude—could count on being the cult heroes they probably weren’t back at school. But for a math girl with bold aspirations, the quest for break-the-mold allure was still daunting, even at CTY nerd camp.
When Yoko Matsuoka traveled to Florida at fifteen in the fall of 1987, her destination was high-powered tennis camp. She was a Tokyo sports prodigy who had devoted her phenomenal energy to excelling on the court, eager to find a way to be more than a dutiful middle school wonk. (If she had read the Time cover story on “Those Asian American Whiz Kids,” out in late August of ’87, the quote from a high school teacher in New York’s Chinatown wouldn’t have surprised her: “Now they think all we know how to do is sit in front of a computer.”) Every good girl in Japan was supposed to be an ideal student, so at eleven, introvert though she was, she had decided on an alternative. The only child of two athletic parents, fervent fans of the “bad boy” tennis star John McEnroe, Yoko had seen a different route for an ambitious upstart like her. Her idol excelled, but he was a rebel type, too. Among his many feats, that attitude especially inspired her, not that she dared overtly embrace it.
Elite talent development in tennis (as in girls’ gymnastics) was on the rise by the mid-1980s, and Japan caught the wave as well. The surge in resources was the youth sports equivalent of the “wealth of facilitative options” that, as Stanley later noted, was fast replacing the “dearth of special, supplemental, accelerative educational opportunities we encountered prior to 1971.” In 1978 a coach named Nick Bollettieri had opened a brutally rigorous tennis academy in Florida. Soon renowned for its stellar roster of junior players, the “tennis factory” model inspired global imitators. Every day at three o’clock, when classmates at her all-girls Catholic school in Tokyo trooped to juku, or “cram school,” Yoko boarded a train to a tennis clinic in the suburbs for hours of conditioning and drill. Every night she returned home at ten-thirty without having eaten dinner. She rose at six-thirty the next morning to hurry off to school. For Yoko, tennis was the focus, but she loved helping fellow students finish their math homework from cram school the day before. She didn’t put it this way, but here was her chance to show off academically—math came easily to her—without being a goody-goody grade-grubber at all.
Yoko rechristened herself Yoky upon her arrival in the United States, where finding her place yet distinguishing herself presented a new set of challenges. She had come to attend Bollettieri’s newly expanded academy in Bradenton, Florida. Before an afternoon of boot-camp-style training at the large spread, the tennis stars spent a morning at the local public schools. Yoky, initially a shy exchange student with shaky English, said barely a word in her classes for three months, but teachers took note that she was ahead in math and physics. In what little spare time she had, she focused on burnishing her language as well as social skills by watching Family Ties and, later, The Cosby Show. She picked up the idea that a wacky “airhead” image was the American girl’s secret to avoiding peer ostracism and getting attention. Being a jock also definitely gave her a boost.
YOKY MATSUOKA Credit 12
Yoky still wasn’t ready to make math and science interests a priority. At any rate, she wasn’t ready to do so publicly, and she didn’t have to. By now Stanley himself had decided that radical acceleration was unnecessarily “flamboyant,” thanks to that new “wealth of facilitative options.” As she settled in, Yoky could avail herself of advanced placement unobtrusively. Back in Tokyo, she had balked at being just another dutiful girl grind. Now she was aware that being a girl geek in the United States was just too weird to be cool. Midyear, when she dared to start talking, she was stunned to find that her peers “think that I’m actually cute”—and she wasn’t about to jinx it. “Come on, this is crazy!” she felt, and shrugged off the academic distinctions that came her way. She saw her friends’ raised eyebrows when signs of nerdy high achievement slipped out. Tenacity and prowess on the tennis court, though, served her perfectly: a source of popularity but also of purposeful autonomy.
The freedom she felt from the constraints of tame schoolgirl life in Japan was thrilling. Yoky was determined to stay in America when her year was up, and her parents gave in—on the condition that she apply to a more academically rigorous private school. Her tennis aspirations still high, Yoky sought out a first-rate athletic program as well and ended up at a private school near Santa Barbara, California. Stanley would have approved of her pace and the improvising that enabled it. After exhausting the school’s math offerings, Yoky was tutored a couple of times a week by a professor from nearby Santa Barbara City College. The next year sh
e took almost all her courses there, while finishing up a few high school requirements and toiling away at tennis—and keeping up the ditzy-girl-jock persona among her peers.
But her persistent refusal to fully embrace math-star status might well have puzzled Stanley (especially since daughters of Asian-born-and-educated parents predominated in the still small but steadily growing female cohort in the 700M group, and they were a big share of girl CTYers, too). His entire mission, after all, presumed that early membership in the company of supertalented math minds was a welcome spur to excel. It certainly was in the case of Sergey Brin, singled out as special well before his CTY summer. For a brash boy with “more nerdy interests than most of my peers,” as he put it later, the imprimatur of precocious math star served to elevate rather than isolate him as he, like Yoky, took college courses in high school. It served him well as he sped on to the University of Maryland. He got his B.A. in three years in 1993, just before he turned twenty, with honors in math and computer science, and he headed to Stanford for a Ph.D. with more graduate courses already under his belt than peers from Harvard or MIT could boast.