Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  For Yoky, not that she summed up the situation in quite these terms, the mantle of math brilliance—with its aura of innate giftedness, its elitist spirit, its presumption of single-minded focus and foreordained career direction—didn’t fit right. While she juggled tennis matches, problem sets, and different career dreams every week (medicine, nutrition, physics, math, engineering, professional tennis), she had always known one thing she didn’t want: to be anybody’s idea of just the good girl on a predictable, adult-approved path. When she arrived at the University of California at Berkeley, a scheduling dilemma forced a decision: if she planned on taking labs, she would have to miss tennis team practices. She opted for labs, but it was a jock-inspired idea—a mechanical “tennis buddy” she had daydreamed about years earlier—that got her excited about robotics. Yoky chose an overwhelmingly male-dominated major, electrical engineering and computer science. Outside of class, she kept up the airhead style and skirted mention of her field (feeling that it was like saying, “Oh, I’m one of those men who don’t wash their hair and smell bad and don’t dress well”). She made sure not to be caught carrying a textbook, vanishing into the library at exam time.

  In retrospect, Yoky sometimes lamented the stress of masquerading: she hadn’t felt exactly liberated to “embrace her inner geek” early on. More often she celebrated the multitasking that her “dual life” taught her, and the multidisciplinary interests she had carved out time for. Well before she found herself at Google, the contours of her path and Sergey’s converged. At Stanford, with lots of graduate coursework already behind him, he now had time for some diversifying, California style—learning to sail, Rollerblading, trying out trapeze arts and gymnastics. His father inquired at one point “if he was taking any advanced courses.” Sergey’s answer: “Yes, advanced swimming.” Tech entrepreneurship invited sampling, too, at a university actively encouraging it by the 1990s; an ideal collaborator, Larry Page, soon joined the computer science department. Sticking to the advanced-degree route, endorsed by Michael Brin with a fervor that Julian Stanley shared, had lost its allure for Sergey. “I tried so many different things in grad school,” he said later, having left without a Ph.D. “The more you stumble around, the more likely you are to stumble across something valuable.”

  In Yoky’s case, finding a way to seem, and feel, girl-like and not grindlike brought real rewards. She avoided getting locked into a particular academic groove before she was ready—a feat of self-definition that ended up fueling high confidence as well as social openness. She also deftly navigated an obstacle to high achievement that had begun to interest psychologists in the mid-1990s: stereotype threat. When people internalize the negative expectations associated with a group to which they belong, they proceed to underperform on tests or other challenges. Girls get lumped as bad at math; nerds, presumed good at math, get labeled as flops with the opposite sex. (Jonathan Edwards knew the burden of that assumption.) Both girls and nerds often get tarred with a reputation for a blinkered lack of creativity, of bold and charismatic “attitude.”

  The clout of sports, and her undercover approach to math, helped Yoky escape all of that. It wasn’t until she got to MIT as a graduate student in 1993 that she could address more directly the gender and peer pressures in male-dominated high-level math and computer pursuits. When she filled out a nametag with “airhead” instead of “Yoky,” her mentor (the pathbreaking roboticist Rodney Brooks) advised what she had begun to recognize herself: it was time to highlight, rather than hide, her idiosyncratic course. That turned out to mean being more than a pioneer in neurobotics, the multidisciplinary realm where her tennis buddy schemes led her. She delved into neuroscience, cross-fertilizing fields in a quest to create a brain-linked artificial hand with human dexterity to help the disabled.

  For Yoky, dropping the antic-girl act also meant cultivating a different, cool-girl geek image. Named a MacArthur fellow in 2007, and by then an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and the mother of three, she often found herself an ambassador of sorts. She didn’t pretend to have easy answers as she addressed a younger generation of girls with STEM leanings. You still risk being considered a social loser, she sighed—and she didn’t recommend her airhead strategy. Still, she thought her path could be instructive. Plenty about it was. You needn’t be, as she had made sure not to be, conspicuously singled out as a preteen math wonder. Early sorting processes like SMPY unwittingly convey that math is only for geniuses. In fact, anointment as a precocious quant may backfire, eroding resilience: girls, Yoky noted, are more prone than boys to take occasional lousy grades as verdicts on their potential.

  She emphasized collaboration and the goal of using technology to help people directly, interests she figured other women shared with her. And she looked back on her tennis obsession as a real asset, not just for jock prestige. The early focus essential to the serious pursuit of sports—or music, Yoky also suggested—could prove more useful than pulling off prodigious math feats. At the same time, juggling different talents and social groups was good practice for coping with the fate that hard-driving women better expect: an extra-heavy dose of competing demands. The year before Yoky headed south for a sabbatical year at brand-new Google X (a Silicon Valley swerve away from academia that eventually led her to Apple, which she left in late 2016), she shared thoughts in a 2009 interview on Cogito.org, a website sponsored by the Center for Talented Youth. Among other things, she described the hectic pace of a life that was anything but solitary, either in her busy lab or at home chasing her kids around.

  Julian Stanley, though no longer alive to read the interview, would surely have saluted her. He had died at eighty-seven in 2005, by which time girls made up nearly a quarter of the 700M group (now called the Study of Exceptional Talent), a tripling over the course of two decades. Back when he had rather brusquely left it to others to “do more” to help girls catch up to the boys in his select club of superhigh math scorers, he hadn’t known what to expect. But Stanley had always been an undaunted and impatient improviser, and so was Yoky. Ready to do what she could to make a dent in an intimidating boy-geek culture, she also urged girls to be bold interlopers. “I am very interested in changing this trend over time, somehow, but it will take time with concrete role models,” she told Cogito. “So my advice is to not worry about it and JUST DO IT.”

  · 5 ·

  Standing out and speeding ahead, yet not ending up too isolated—or too insular: Jonathan Edwards had those challenges very much in mind as he approached his fifties, the age Julian Stanley had been when he embarked on his mission to cultivate a math-minded elite. Over the decades since his IntraNet startup, success for Edwards had been inseparable from struggle. Against the odds, he felt, he lucked into family life: in 1991 he married a woman he once described as “all heart” to his “all brains.” They went on to have three children. After “many years of toil and tears,” he and his partner sold IntraNet in 1998 for stock worth $49.1 million.

  His Tom Swift stage behind him, Edwards was still an uncredentialed outlier. In 2002 he found a niche at MIT as an unpaid research fellow in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab’s Software Design Group. Half a decade earlier, in 1997, Joe Bates, a full-time professor at Carnegie Mellon, entered the business world: he founded a company using AI to create newly rich interactive drama in video games for children, featuring characters who seemed to have feelings and awareness. In 2005, now the CEO of another company, he tackled a bold hardware project still under way a decade later—a superfast, less accurate chip, which he felt held the key to a new leap forward in AI, as well as to advances in other sciences and in augmented reality.

  Edwards would never be socially at ease, he knew by now, or free of the pressure to leave behind an “intellectual legacy.” He had found an urgent question that consumed him—how to radically simplify the programming of software applications, which had become extraordinarily intricate. Edwards’s paradigm-challenging mission was itself daunting
, and in 2015 he was still experimenting. With his “vision of bringing programming to everyone,” he wasn’t thinking small. His quest went against the grain of the geek hierarchy in which he had risen so young and so fast. He left MIT in 2015 for a stint with the Communications Design Group, newly created by Alan Kay, who had dreamed up the Dynabook for “children of all ages” forty-five years earlier at Xerox PARC. “Our nerd culture embraces inhuman levels of complexity,” Edwards wrote on his blog, Alarming Development, in 2016.

  Mastering mind-boggling complexity is our mutant superpower. It is our tribal marker. Complexity is the air we breathe, and so it is invisible to us. Simplification will only come from outside this culture. To disrupt programming I first have to reinvent it for a fresh audience of non-programmers.

  Edwards chafed at the hypermeritocratic elitism he saw on all sides, constraining boldness and openness. In conversation half a decade earlier, he had sighed at the MIT graduate student scene, packed with “brilliant, compulsive achievers…like Olympic athletes,” with no life, no youth. Back in the 1970s, when the computer revolution had just begun, young “outliers and freaks like myself,” he said, had felt free to try “wild stuff,” to veer off appointed paths and break rules. Living in the affluent Boston suburb of Wellesley, he worried over the competitive stress in his children’s lives, too. He didn’t wish his youthful misfit miseries on his daughter and two sons, but he didn’t want them caught up in what he called “the achievatron thing” either.

  That was his phrase for a whole culture of studiously calibrated achievement, starting early and culminating in a cutthroat college admissions process at top-tier schools. Jonathan, with Joe, had been a kind of harbinger, and CTY, however unwittingly, had encouraged the downward creep of accelerated, adult-directed credentializing for student superstars. In an online forum for former participants called RealCTY, such complaints got an airing. For the alumnus who had extolled the “fellowship of geeks” in the early 1980s, CTY’s remarkable growth and success jeopardized what had felt special. He lamented the spread of a “get-ahead” attitude, students “moaning about transfer credit and placement issues.” Younger alumni on the site reproached the staff for stifling the best and most important part of the experience: peer communing and craziness outside the classroom.

  As two honorary forerunners of CTY, Edwards and Bates were eager to share a Julian Stanley association with their children, but acceleration held little allure. When his eldest made the cut for a summer program, Edwards was pleased that his son had zero interest in fast-track math and happily gravitated to offbeat courses (existentialism, literature of the fantastic). Jonathan hoped his children would soak up what he had missed out on—learning “how life works, [how] to be balanced,” how to bond. Bates, though still haunted by how easy it can be for any kid to “absorb as normal the notion that everything should happen fast,” was glad when his daughter wanted to enroll in a CTY session. He was always telling his two children what he felt he had been told a little too late: proceed at the pace you want. In fact, he said, “I’m sure they’re sick of hearing it.” But in an ideal world, Joe thought, every student would have the chance to do just that. Amid the great variety of minds out there, his own didn’t strike him as particularly rare.

  Stanley’s pioneers—the boys he had so eagerly steered onto the established academic path while their computer-obsessed counterparts on the West Coast were forging ahead without much adult supervision—had ended up looking and sounding, if anything, more like the outsiders. Jobs and Gates had thrived on their combative alliances with friends, flouting guidance from their elders. Impatient arrogance had quickly become a trademark. (The professor who supervised Harvard’s computer lab, where Gates had been at all hours before he dropped out, described him as “an obnoxious human being…not a pleasant fellow to have around.” At Atari, where Jobs worked after dropping out of Reed, he let older employees know that he considered many of them “dumb shits.”) They, like Sergey Brin and Larry Page later on at Google, helped fuel what Ellen Ullman called “the cult of the boy engineer.” Theirs was a hacker world renowned more for being a ruthlessly competitive hothouse than a free-ranging enterprise.

  Silicon Valley was, of course, hearing plenty about how “the culture of programming unfairly excludes” some groups, Edwards wrote on his blog. “More power to them,” he said of the underrepresented aspirants clamoring “to join the programming elite and get a spot at the startup trough.” But in his view, a “bigger issue with far greater importance to society” demanded attention. A potent toy, as Stewart Brand had called the computer decades earlier, had “come to the people.” The dream that the computer would prove a truly liberating tool for all had not. “The bigger injustice is that programming has become an elite: a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication,” Edwards declared, his reclusive young self surely in mind. “Normal humans are effectively excluded from developing software,” he felt, but including them was the cause that now drove him. Wryly anointing himself “a Mad Computer Scientist,” he had emailed several years earlier that “my goal in life since an early age has been to leave behind me one good idea,” and speed had long since ceased to be the point. “A new way of programming will be it, or nothing.”

  PART IV

  MIRACLES and STRIVERS

  CHAPTER 7

  The Mystery of Savant Syndrome

  · 1 ·

  Bill Gates has been informally diagnosed with it. So, after the fact, have Newton, Mozart, Yeats, and Wittgenstein. The label gets applied to Bobby Fischer, obsessive and unable to look anybody in the eye. Reclusive William James Sidis, with his trolley fixation, is a candidate, too. And Jonathan Edwards raised this possibility in retrospect: maybe Asperger’s syndrome, not just off-the-charts mathematical skills, helped account for his sense of being so out of step. Of course, he had grown up well before the autism spectrum disorder—called by some “the engineers’ disease”—claimed a place in the 1994 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s authoritative guide. Nearly twenty years later, in 2013, the Asperger’s label was officially dropped. But high-functioning autism had come trailing an aura of precocious genius, along with painful social cluelessness, and that aura was here to stay. The very bright yet remote “little professor” profile had become, as a journalist put it, “a signature disorder of the high-tech information age.” The diagnosis, rooted in descriptions published in 1944 by the Viennese pediatrician Hans Asperger, seemed to be everywhere—a portent of struggle, surely, yet also perhaps of unusual potential. Hadn’t Asperger said that “for success in science and art a dash of autism is essential”?

  An unsettling experience, or some version of it, no longer belongs to obscure lore: a wriggly toddler, obsessed with numbers and letters, is already spelling out words—when he isn’t intently lining up his toy cars or melting down at loud noises. Perhaps he begins to seem even harder to engage than usual. Or a teacher or relative remarks that he isn’t really interacting with other kids. A parent’s something-isn’t-quite-right feeling intensifies. It is time to turn to, where else, the Internet. Venture beyond UrbanBaby and there, awaiting discovery, is a new term that might help explain an avid, and cuddle-averse, code-breaker: “Is my child an autistic savant?” Dr. Darold A. Treffert, a soft-spoken Wisconsin psychiatrist in his eighties who has been called the “godfather of savant research,” was surprised by how often visitors to his website sent that question to his inbox as the new millennium got under way. Hopes and fears about what a child will grow into, or out of, can take sudden swerves.

  An expert consultant on the multi-Oscar-winning Rain Man (1988), Treffert had banished the old idiot prefix and helped spread an awareness of a disorienting phenomenon: remarkable gifts emerging in tandem with profound neurological problems—and “without lessons or training,” he marveled. In the film, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt, fidgety and uncommunicative, could count spilled toothpicks at a glance
and multiply big numbers very fast. Neuroscientists and psychologists, though stymied by a sample size too small for rigorous study, were fascinated. Musical gifts (including absolute pitch), artistic flair (generally hyperrealistic), calendrical agility (naming the days of the week on which particular dates fall), computational virtuosity: the startling skills, accompanied by astonishing powers of memory, seemed to be disproportionately associated with autism.

  Treffert had a new prefix for those who burst forth with more than “splinter skills.” They were “prodigious”—the rarest subcategory of already rare savants, who would count as prodigies even if they had no disability. Soon enough his informal global inventory of prodigious savants could boast a bona-fide American prodigy, a preteen with a reedy voice and an innocently intent Harry Potter face. His name was Matt Savage, and by the time Treffert met him, he had been hailed a “Mozart of jazz.” Born in 1992 in Boston and given an autism spectrum diagnosis three years later, Matt emerged as the perfect poster child for the newly capacious vision of savant gifts, not that anyone told him the term. Matt, easily overwhelmed by a clamorous world, loved multiplying large numbers, performing calendrical stunts, amassing facts—the telltale memory-based, repetitive sort of talents that cropped up in roughly one in ten people on the autism spectrum. But his real fervor was directed elsewhere. Starting at six, Matt had made remarkably rapid progress on the piano. He was soon jamming and composing at a sped-up tempo, too. A CD of his pieces, which he performed with a jazz trio, was out by the time he was seven.

  For savants, precisely that kind of creative and improvisational work had been presumed out of bounds, yet here was an autistic child with a near spontaneous gift for it. Even “normal” musical prodigies rarely manage such feats of invention—and when they do, Mozartian is almost always the adjective that gets bestowed. In the case of another prolific young composer who found himself in the spotlight, it was inevitable. Jay Greenberg, born half a year before Matt, shared the Harry Potter look—thick eyebrows and glasses, and an intense gaze that didn’t quite engage. He also displayed similar sensory hypersensitivity and what seemed like effortless musical wizardry. The boys didn’t share a genre: before he turned ten, Jay was busy transcribing classical orchestral works straight from his head onto paper—among them a haunting Brahmsian Overture to 9/11. By contrast, tuning in to people proved a struggle for him, yet Jay also didn’t share an autism diagnosis with Matt.