I cannot speak for the young man in the article, but I can share our experience with our son. It had absolutely nothing to with our pushing him ahead and everything to do with him running ahead and dragging me from behind. When he was 6, we were baking cookies and he asked me if I knew the magic of rows. I had no idea what he was even talking about. He then went on to tell me that if you had 5 rows of cookies and 4 cookies in each row, there were 20 cookies. He said if you looked at the window panes, that 6 rows of 3 were 18 window panes. He said he played with his Lego blocks and recognized that the pattern of rows and numbers in lots of combinations and what they all equaled. He saw math everywhere.
By age 9, there was not a single concept in elementary math that he had not completely mastered and he was intuitively solving algebraically. He would have been bored to tears to have spent the next several yrs doing nothing but math he had long since mastered. We did try to slow him down by having him taking courses like counting and probablility, but math is simply the way he thinks and he thrives on complex and challenging problems.
By 8th grade, math of physics totally captured his interest and he spent hours reading on the Internet, reading books, watching Great Courses lectures during his free time. I don’t know any physics (and he was beyond my math abilities by 8th grade.) He absorbed physics like he did math.
For him, taking typical high school math and science coursework would have meant learning nothing new for yrs and depriving him of the subjects that brought him great pleasure. Spending hours puzzling through a complicated proof was something he loved. Doing plug and chug problems frustrated him and made him feel like he was simply wasting his time.