Have you encountered someone who you thought were extraordinarily smart or talented (different imo)

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in your high school or college or graduate school? If so, in what way were they extraordinarily smart or talented, and what eventually became of them? If not, who is the smartest/gifted person you encountered in your life? Did they go on to make some significant contribution in the field they were great? I never came across someone who I thought was on a genius level (it could be that I was too obtuse to realize that the person was on that level), but for me, the smartest person I know in math was my high school friend who went to MIT and got all As with a decent amount of effort (while playing recreational sport and dating). But he told me he’s just pretty okay when compared to some students at MIT who breeze through tests without even studying and instead are devoting their time on their projects.

I did have one professor in college who could recite the entire book (Milton’s Paradise Lost), but personally, I don’t consider THAT (photographic memory) as being brilliant, although I am pretty sure he was brilliant in his field.

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A British girl enrolled in my high school one year. She was two years younger than the rest of my class. We could tell she was brilliant. We lost touch after she moved back to England. In the late 90s I was watching Nova and there she was, talking about string theory! I looked her up and she had done her PhD work under Stephen Hawking.

I met another girl at a high school piano workshop who went on to become, at the time, the youngest Rhodes Scholar ever.

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I have a friend who’s unbelievably quick at grasping concepts. He started in Algebra in freshman year, but through perseverance and passion, he’s currently taking graduate level math at a local university as a senior in high school.