Childhoods of exceptional tech entrepreneurs
Commonalities, parenting style, mentors, school environments
I've been reading with fascination Why we stopped making Einsteins (with followups II, and III ) by
. He puts forward the hypothesis that we stopped producing geniuses on par with those from earlier centuries because we went from 1:1 tutoring from experts in a field to mass instruction in schools. In a way, Childhoods of exceptional people by is searching for historical evidence for Erik's theory by reading 42 biographies of remarkable scientists and artists and noting any parallels he found.As a father, Henrik is also searching for inspiring and unusual child-rearing practices. I was curious to to carry out this experiment further, by reading biographies of notable individuals who lived in the present rather than the past. So I put together this sloppily-edited extract from wikipedia and other sources.
I just focused on computer scientists instead of scientists and artists as in the articles mentioned above, because the artists I admire are not very mainstream and it would be hard to agree on what an exceptional artist is, so it is simpler to choose tech entrepreneurs. I picked some of the most well known, but there might be important omissions. I mostly selected those who created technology used by millions of people (regardless of the positive or negative impact of this tech). The list was getting too long already but you can repeat the experiment with the artists you admire and post a link in the comments.
This might be a ridiculous endeavour, but as a parent myself, and growing up in a completely different setting, I wanted to understand what households that raised scientists looked like. Whenever I could, I included information about the parents' background, parenting style, mentors or tutors, types of schools, the environment they experienced as teenagers, personality traits, temperament.
Bill Gates
Born 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Gates grew up in an upper-middle-class family His father, William H. Gates Sr., was a prominent lawyer. His mother Mary, after a brief career as a teacher devoted her time to helping raise the children and working on civic affairs and with charities. She also served on several corporate boards, including those of the First Interstate Bank in Seattle (founded by her grandfather), the United Way (a large non-profit organization) and International Business Machines (IBM). She would often take Gates along when she volunteered in schools and at community organizations.
Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career. When he was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination. Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing". Gates showed early signs of competitiveness when he coordinated family athletic games at their summer house on Puget Sound. He also relished in playing board games (Risk was his favorite) and excelled at Monopoly.
Bill was a voracious reader as a child, spending many hours poring over reference books such as the encyclopedia. Around the age of 11 or 12, Gates's parents began to have concerns about his behavior. He was doing well in school, but he seemed bored and withdrawn at times, and his parents worried he might become a loner.
Though they were strong believers in public education, when Gates turned 13, his parents enrolled him at Seattle's exclusive preparatory Lakeside School. He blossomed in nearly all his subjects, excelling in math and science, but also doing very well in drama and English.
While at Lakeside School, a Seattle computer company offered to provide computer time for the students. Gates took an interest in programming the system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe
Gates met Paul Allen, who was two years his senior, in high school at Lakeside School. The pair became fast friends, bonding over their common enthusiasm for computers, even though they were very different people. Allen was more reserved and shy. Gates was feisty and at times combative.
Together with Paul Allen and two other students, they offered to find bugs in Computer Center Corporation software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than using the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language.
He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 and scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT).
Gates enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973, originally thinking of a career in law. Much to his parents' dismay, Gates dropped out of college in 1975 to pursue his business, Microsoft, with partner Allen.
Steve Jobs
Steve was born in San Francisco, on 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali. Abdulfattah was born in an Arab Muslim household to a wealthy Syrian father and a housewife mother. After obtaining his undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut, he pursued a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin. There, he met Joanne Schieble, an American Catholic of German descent whose parents owned a mink farm and real estate. The two fell in love but faced opposition from Schieble's father due to Jandali's Muslim faith. When Schieble became pregnant, she arranged for a closed adoption, and travelled to San Francisco to give birth
Paul and Clara Jobs had been wanting a child for many years before one finally came into their lives. Paul Jobs was the son of a dairy farmer; after dropping out of high school, he worked as a mechanic, then joined the U.S. Coast Guard. When his ship was decommissioned, he met Clara Hagopian, an American of Armenian descent, and the two were engaged ten days later, in March 1946, and married that same year. The couple moved to Wisconsin, then Indiana, where Paul Jobs worked as a machinist and later as a car salesman. Since Clara missed San Francisco, she convinced Paul to move back. There, Paul worked as a repossession agent, and Clara became a bookkeeper.
Steve grew into an active and curious toddler. Twice they had to rush him to the emergency room: one time because Steve had stuck a metal pin into an electric socket and burned his hand, and another time because he had eaten poison!
Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake.I wanted to return him." When girlfriend Chrisann shared this comment of Clara with Steve, he stated that he was already aware, and later said he had been deeply loved and indulged by Paul and Clara.
Steve always knew he was adopted. When he was about six years old, he told a little girl who lived across the street. “So, does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” she asked. Steve ran home crying. His parents explained that was not the case at all. “We specifically picked you,” they said, speaking with great emphasis to make sure he understood. “I’ve always felt special,” Steve later said. “My parents made me feel special.”
Paul built a workbench in his garage for his son in order to "pass along his love of mechanics”. Jobs, meanwhile, admired his father's craftsmanship "because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him … I wasn't that into fixing cars … but I was eager to hang out with my dad."
Growing up in Silicon Valley, Steve had many neighbours who worked as engineers. One of them, Larry Lang, became an important mentor. “What Larry did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing,” Steve explained. “He put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker.”
Steve’s father had told him that an electronic amplifier was needed to do this, but here was a system that worked without one. “I proudly went home to my father and announced that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a battery,” he recalled. “My father told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and we got into a very large argument.” So, Steve dragged his dad to Larry’s house so he could see it for himself.
Over the next few years, Larry taught Steve a lot about electronics. He introduced him to Heathkits, a type of kit with detailed instructions for making items like television receivers and radio equipment. Steve said that these kits not only taught him how things worked but also helped him develop a belief that even things that seemed complex – like televisions and radios – could be studied and understood.
Steve’s mom, Clara, taught him to read before he started kindergarten. In the classroom, though, Steve’s learning did not go smoothly. His first school was Monta Loma Elementary, just four blocks from his house. “I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble,” he admitted.
Another time, Steve let a snake loose in the classroom, and then he set off a small explosion under the teacher’s chair. By the end of third grade, Steve had been sent home from school several times. His parents didn’t punish him, though. They thought it was partly the school’s fault – Steve was misbehaving because he wasn’t being challenged in class. Steve agreed, saying that he was always being asked to “memorise stupid stuff.”
But being bored was only part of the problem. Steve also had a strong dislike for authority and hated being told what to do. Luckily, in fourth grade, he had a teacher who understood him. Mrs Hill started out by bribing Steve to do math problems, but before long, he was enjoying learning and wanted to please her. “I learned more from her than any other teacher,” Steve said. If it hadn’t been for Mrs Hill, he admitted, “I’m sure I would’ve gone to jail.”`
Mrs Hill recognised that Steve needed to be challenged, and the school recommended that he skip two grades. His parents thought that was too much, but they agreed to let Steve move up from fourth grade to sixth. That meant switching to another school.
At Crittenden Middle School, the environment was much rougher, and fights were common. Being a year younger than the other students was hard, and Steve was often bullied. His sixth-grade report card noted that he had trouble getting motivated. Halfway through seventh grade, Steve decided he’d had enough.
“He came home one day,” recalled his father, “and said if he had to go back there again, he just wouldn’t go.” The Jobs family was not affluent, and only by expending all their savings were they able to buy a new home, allowing Steve to change schools.
In ninth grade, Steve started at Homestead High. The school had an electronics class with a well-equipped lab and a passionate teacher named Mr McCollum. But Steve, with his rebellious attitude and rejection of authority, clashed with the teacher. According to Mr McCollum, Steve was usually “off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class.” Although he loved electronics, Steve dropped the course.
Outside school, however, Steve was beginning to find others who shared his interests. He joined the Explorer’s Club at Hewlett-Packard, where Larry Lang worked. The students met in the cafeteria, where engineers would talk to them about their projects: lasers, holography, light-emitting diodes. Steve was in heaven. It was at HP that he saw his first computer. “I fell in love with it,” he said.
Steve was also working on a project of his own: he wanted to build a frequency counter to measure the rate of pulses in an electronic signal. He didn’t have all the parts he needed, so he looked in the phone book for Bill Hewlett, the head of Hewlett-Packard, and called him at home. Not only did he get the parts he needed, but Bill also gave him a summer job in a factory that made frequency counters.
It was while he was still in high school that Steve Jobs met his future business partner, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was five years older and highly adept with electronics. In fact, he had learned some of his skills in Mr McCollum’s class.
During his last two years at Homestead High, Jobs developed two different interests: electronics and literature.
He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of brain and kind of hippie … but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies,
When Steve was twenty-one, he and Wozniak founded the Apple Computer Company. At first, they worked out of Steve’s bedroom, and later they moved the business into the Jobs family’s garage.
Stephen Wolfram
(is not in the list of Physicists ranked by citation: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.1.20180607a/full/
Stephen Wolfram was born in London in 1959 to Hugo and Sybil Wolfram, both German Jewish refugees to the United Kingdom. His maternal grandmother was British psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander. Stephen’s father, Hugo Wolfram, was a textile manufacturer and served as managing director of a textile Company. He was also a novelist Stephen’s mother, Sybil Wolfram, was a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at University of Oxford.
He went to a private elementary school in Oxford (Dragon School), “probably the most famous elementary school in England”.
'When I first went to school, they thought I was behind,'' Wolfram recounts, ''because I didn't want to read the silly books they gave us. And I never was able to do arithmetic.''
It was when he got into higher mathematics, such as calculus, he says, that he realized there was an invisible world that he wanted to explore.
His interest in science began early, ignited by the space programme,
“that was 1967 […], I started collecting all the information I could about every spacecraft launched—and putting together little books summarizing it.”
“back then, there was supposed to be a Mars colony any day, and I started doing little designs for that, and for spacecraft and things. And that got me interested in propulsion and ion drives and stuff like that—and by the time I was 11 what I was really interested in was physics.”
“when I was turning 12 I ended up spending the summer putting together all the facts I could accumulate about physics.”
“The summer when I turned 13, I put together a summary of particle physics”
By his early teenage years he had read his way through a variety of college physics textbooks. As the age of 15, he published his first scientific paper, in the field of particle physics. "I wasn't really interested in the exercises in the textbook," he says.
“When I was a kid I was really interested in physics. And to do physics you have to do a lot of math calculations. Which I found really boring, and wasn’t very good at.
So what did I do? Well, I figured out that even though I might not be good at these calculations, I could make a computer be good at them. And needless to say, that’s what I did”
“I’ve always been interested in trajectories of people’s lives, and one thing I’ve noticed is that after some great direction has emerged in someone’s life, one can almost always look back and see the seeds of it very early. Like I was recently a bit shocked actually to find some things I did when I was 12 years old—about systematizing knowledge and data—and to realize that what I was trying to do was incredibly similar to Wolfram|Alpha. And then to realize that my tendency to invent projects and organize other kids to help do them was awfully like leading an entrepreneurial company.”
Wolfram was educated at Eton College, the most famous high school in Britain, but left prematurely. He never officially graduated from high school
He entered Oxford University at 17 without A-levels and left around a year later without graduating. He was bored and he had been invited to cross the pond by the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to do a PhD. "I had written a bunch of papers and so was pretty well known by that time," he explains. He received his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1979, aged 20, and joined the faculty. At 22, he won a MacArthur Fellowship, becoming the then youngest winner of the "genius grant".
Elon Musk
Born in 1971 in in Pretoria, one of South Africa's capital cities.
His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine. He tried to raise his sons "as South African boys", instilling in them the same discipline he learnt in the military "I was a strict father. My word was the law. They learnt from me, "I strove to be the best in the type of business that I was in,"
Musk's family was wealthy during his youth. His father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, with his children cited as sharing their father's dislike of apartheid.
Elon’s mother Maye, was a Canadian model and dietitian who grew up in South Africa.
Elon rarely saw either of them.
“I didn’t really have a primary nanny or anything,” Musk recalls. “I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didn’t break anything. She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. I’m shocked that I have all my fingers.” He raises his hands and examines them, then lowers his digits. “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.”
He reportedly read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at age nine and would pore over science fiction novels, comics and nonfiction books for up to 10 hours a day.
"Even as young as four years old, he would tend to sit with adult people," said Errol.
He recounted one occasion when "one man said to him, 'Hey little chap, why don't you join the kids and run around?' And he'd say, 'No, I prefer to listen to you'."
Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, a private primary boys' only school
At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program. At age twelve, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500
After his parents' acrimonious divorce, Elon decided to live with his father
Hi father also recalled a time when Elon made a hurtful comment to a schoolmate about his father's suicide. The boy pushed Elon down a staircase at school, injuring him so badly he had to be hospitalised. After that incident, Errol moved Elon to the prestigious Pretoria Boys High School.
Musk has been open about his difficult childhood. He was not only the youngest and smallest kid in his class, but he was nerdier and much more into books than many jocks at school.
Gangs of boys at would sometimes hunt him down. “I was almost beaten to death,” he added on an interview. The bullying continued until he was 15 years old, when went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself by doing karate, judo and wrestling.
In the same interview, he described his father as emotionally abusive. “My father has serious issues”. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”
According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ – “brilliant at engineering, brilliant” – and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineer’s qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining – at times so much that he claims he couldn’t close his safe.
After high school, Elon emigrated to Canada and eventually to the US and completed studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the Wharton School, UPenn
Sergey Brin
Born on 1973, in Moscow in the Soviet Union to Russian Jewish parents, Mikhail and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University (MSU). His father is a retired mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Sergey did not go to preschool, but rather stayed at home.
Officially, anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. Jews were excluded from the physics department, in particular, at the prestigious Moscow State University, because Soviet leaders did not trust them with nuclear rocket research.
When the family decided to emigrate, they were fired from their jobs and after year-long difficulties with their exit visas, in 1979 they were allowed to leave the country. Shortly afterward, the iron gates of Russia were shut to Jews wishing to leave. They lived in Vienna and Paris while Mikhail Brin secured a teaching position at the University of Maryland. Sergey was 6 at the time.
Sergey says in an interview: Coming to the States, what few possessions we had in the Soviet Union we had to leave, almost all. So we had to really build up from nothing. And I think that just kind of gave me a different perspective in life than a lot of other people have."
"The U.S. was very good to us. It was a great place, but we started with nothing, we were poor, we didn't have any stuff, you know. When we first moved to the States we rented a little house, and my parents didn't have a proper room to sleep in. They had to kind of wall off the kitchen. It was humble beginnings."
Sergey struggled to adjust. Bright-eyed and bashful, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, Sergey spoke with a heavy accent when he started school. “It was a difficult year for him, the first year,” recalls Genia. “We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasn’t the case.”
Patty Barshay, the school’s director, became a friend and mentor to Sergey and his parents. “Sergey wasn’t a particularly outgoing child,” she says, “but he always had the self-confidence to pursue what he had his mind set on.”
He gravitated toward puzzles, maps and math games that taught multiplication. “I really enjoyed the Montessori method,” he tells me. “I could grow at my own pace.” He adds that the Montessori environment—which gives students the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests—helped foster his creativity.
“I do somewhat feel like a minority,” he says. “Being Jewish, especially in Russia, is one aspect of that. Then, being an immigrant in the U.S. And then, since I was significantly ahead in math in school, being the youngest one in a class.
If there was one Jewish value the Brin family upheld without reservation, Michael says, it was scholarship. Sergey’s brother—who in his younger years was more fond of basketball than homework—even got the notion that advanced degrees were mandatory for all professions. “Sam once asked us, ‘Is it true that before you play in the N.B.A. you have to get a Ph.D.?’” recalls his dad. To which the professor couldn’t resist replying, “Yes, Sam, that’s it!”
His father gave him a Commodore 64 computer when Sergey was 9. By middle school, Sergey was recognized as a math prodigy. He went on to Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a large public school in Greenbelt, Maryland, where, according to some accounts, he was cocky about his math skills, often challenging teachers on their methods and results.
“I didn’t systematically teach Sergey; he would ask when he wanted to know something, ”his father recalled.
Sergey raced through High School in three years, amassing a year’s worth of college credits that would enable him to finish college in three years as well. At the University of Maryland, he majored in mathematics and computer science and graduated near the top of his class at the age of 19. In 1993, he interned at Wolfram Research, the developers of Mathematica.
When he won a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school, he insisted on Stanford. (M.I.T. had rejected him.)
Larry Page
Like Sergey, Larry is the son of high-powered intellects steeped in computer science. His father, Carl Victor Page, a PhD, pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence His mother, Gloria, holds a master’s degree in computer science and was an instructor in college programming classes.
Born on 1973 in Lansing, Michigan. His mother is Jewish; his maternal grandfather later immigrated to Israel, though Page's household growing up was secular. Page's paternal grandparents came from a Protestant background.
Page recalled his childhood home "was usually a mess, with computers, science, and technology magazines and Popular Science magazines all over the place", an environment in which he immersed himself. Page was an avid reader during his youth, writing in his 2013 Google founders letter: "I remember spending a huge amount of time pouring [sic] over books and magazines".
According to writer Nicholas Carlson, the combined influence of Page's home atmosphere and his attentive parents "fostered creativity and invention". Page also played instruments and studied music composition while growing up
Page was first attracted to computers when he was six years old, as he was able to "play with the stuff lying around"—first-generation personal computers—that had been left by his mother and father. He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor". His older brother Carl Victor Page Jr. also taught him to take things apart and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked". He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became interested in technology and business. Probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually."
As a 12-year-old he read Tesla's biography and cried. Tesla died alone and in debt, unable to persuade new investors to fund his latest wild visions. In that moment, Page realized it wasn’t enough to envision an innovative technological future. Big ideas aren’t enough. They need to be commercialized. If Page wanted to be an inventor, he was going to have to start a successful company, too.
Page attended the Okemos public Montessori School from ages 2 to 7. He attended East Lansing public High School, graduating in 1991. In summer school, he attended Interlochen Center for the Arts at Interlochen, Michigan, playing flute but mainly saxophone for two summers.
Page received a Bachelor of Science in a major in computer engineering with honors from the University of Michigan in 1995 and a Master of Science in computer science from Stanford University. Page and Brin met at Stanford University in 1996, where both were doctoral students in the computer science program.
Brin would bring a much-needed extroversion that Page lacked. Brin excelled at strategy, branding, and developing relationships between Google and other companies. He was a partner to Page, if, ultimately, a junior one. While Google is often thought of as the invention of two young computer whizzes — Sergey and Larry, Larry and Sergey — the truth is that Google is a creation of Larry Page, helped along by Sergey Brin.
Demis Hassabis
Born in London, in 1976, and grew up in and around Finchley and Hendon. His mother is Chinese-Singaporean and worked in John Lewis department store. His father, of Greek Cypriot descent “did lots of different things”, including being a singer-songwriter.
Demis is the eldest of three siblings. His parents are teachers who once owned a toyshop. “My parents are technophobes. They don’t really like computers. They’re kind of bohemian. My sister and brother both went the artistic route, too. None of them really went in for maths or science.”, Demis explains. His sister is a composer and pianist; his brother studies creative writing. Technology did not loom large in their household. “I’m definitely the alien black sheep in my family”
He had a period of home schooling, and paid tribute to his “bohemian” parents, from whom he learned that “you don’t have to be constricted by social norms”. During these early years, Demis played chess. He was a child prodigy in chess from the age of 4. Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13
With winnings from a chess competition he managed to buy his first chess computer, a ZX Spectrum, when he was about eight years old. He went to bookstores, got books on programming and started learning to program games on his own.
At one time he was the world’s second highest-ranked player of his age, but says he had an epiphany at a large chess tournament in Liechtenstein when he realised that all the brainpower in evidence there could be put to better use for the benefit of humanity.
Attended Christ’s College in Finchley (a state secondary school, secular with non-selective entry). “I jumped a few years ahead,” he says. “Schoolwork wasn’t that challenging but I had so many extra-curricular activities — programming professional games — that took up my excess brain power.”
His two sons also go to comprehensive (free, state-run) school.
“I don’t want to put too much pressure on them. I think coding should be taught at school to make sure the UK produces the next generation of skilled programmers, but I think children should be encouraged to follow their passions and if they don’t know what they are yet, to explore as many things as possible until they find something they love and then work hard at it to be as good as they can at it. I think that leads to a very happy, fulfilling life.”
He took his A-levels aged 16 and won a place at Cambridge, but since he was too young to take it up, he began his initial career in computer gaming by working for the British company, Bullfrog Productions, where he worked as a designer on the game Syndicate and was lead programmer for the highly influential Theme Park. A bestseller, it won the industry’s Golden Joystick Award and spawned a host of management simulation games.
When he eventually went to Cambridge, where he took a double first in the Computer Science Tripos at Queens’ College, he partied hard and had “an amazing three years”. He went on to take a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience where he deliberately chose to study topics where AI had failed so far: memory and imagination.
Mark Zuckerberg
Born on, 1984, in New York to dentist Edward Zuckerberg and psychiatrist Karen Kempner, who stopped practicing to take care of the children and to work as her husband’s office manager.
Zuckerberg was raised in a Reform Jewish household. His great-grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Germany, and Poland.
Mark grew up in a hilltop house in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Attached to the basement is the dental office of his father. Edward said in an interview, "My wife was a superwoman. She managed to work and be home. We had a unique situation because my office was in the house. I highly recommend it if it works for your occupation. It did afford the ability to work and be home with the kids at the same time."
Edward was an early user of digital radiography, and he introduced Atari BASIC computer programming to his son. The house and the dental office were full of computers. One afternoon in 1996, Edward declared that he wanted a better way of announcing a patient’s arrival than the receptionist yelling, “Patient here!” Mark built a software program that allowed the computers in the house and the office to send messages to one another. He called it ZuckNet, and it was basically a primitive version of AOL Instant Messenger, which came out the following year. The receptionist used it to ping Edward, and the kids used it to ping each other.
Some kids played computer games. Mark created them. In all of our talks, the most animated Zuckerberg ever got—speaking with a big smile, almost tripping on his words, his eyes alert—was when he described his youthful adventures in coding. “I had a bunch of friends who were artists,” he said. “They’d come over, draw stuff, and I’d build a game out of it.” When he was about eleven, his parents hired a computer tutor, a software developer named David Newman, who came to the house once a week to work with Mark. “He was a prodigy,” Newman told me. “Sometimes it was tough to stay ahead of him.” (Newman lost track of Zuckerberg and was stunned when he learned during our interview that his former pupil had built Facebook.) Soon thereafter, Mark started taking a graduate computer course every Thursday night at nearby Mercy College. When his father dropped him off at the first class, the instructor looked at Edward and said, pointing to Mark, “You can’t bring him to the classroom with you.” Edward told the instructor that his son was the student.
Mark attended high school at Ardsley High School (a state-run high school) before transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy (a highly selective, coeducational private boarding school, “the most elite boarding school in America” where all classes are taught seminar-style, with students gathered around circular tables. The strategy, known as the Harkness method. According to the school, pupils come to class prepared and ready to discuss, and engage with the material on a deeper level than could be achieved through traditional lectures.
At Exeter, he became captain of the fencing team. He earned a diploma in classics. But computers were always central. For his senior project at Exeter, he wrote software that he called Synapse. Created with a friend, Synapse was like an early version of Pandora—a program that used artificial intelligence to learn users’ listening habits. News of the software’s existence spread on technology blogs. Soon AOL and Microsoft made it known that they wanted to buy Synapse and recruit the teen-ager who’d invented it. He turned them down.
Edward said he was not familiar with "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," although he was really involved in raising his children. There’s a video he took when Mark received the Harvard acceptance email
Some Conclusions
Just like Henrik, I found “that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted”. This is super evident in the drawings of 11 year old Wolfram and the little books he put together. That’s not something you achieve by tutoring alone. Additionally, quite a few in my list are rumoured to have mild Asperger’s (or ASD) ; this may also be the case for the individuals in Erik Hoel’s and Henrik Karlsson's articles.
Does the school environment even matter at this aptitude level? Homeschooling wasn't a popular choice at the time. Given that bullying was a constant and most report some level of disengagement with school and later dropped out of University, perhaps another type of education would have suit them better. Nonetheless, they all attended great schools and met future business partners there.
Making this list made me question Erik Hoel’s assertion that is difficult to name exceptional people (men who deserve to be thought of as “world-historical” figures) who are living today or died in the last decades. Particularly after listening to this interview with Demis Hassabis who as a teenager was a top chess player, then made a hit videogames, and later went on to found one of the leading AI companies which solved protein folding and is now helping to solve nuclear fusion.
We don't know to what extent the parents acted as aristocratic tutors. Although they appeared to be very involved in the education of their children and a large proportion of the parents hold degrees in math or engineering, it sounds like the children were mainly self-motivated. Nevertheless, their social environments was probably close to what Henrik calls an exceptional milieu
The parents are more commonly affluent, often part of what Matthew Stewart calls “the 9.9 percent”, succeeding in “optimizing their child as a future member of the meritocracy”. Also parental divorce was rare.
These children were free to pursue their interests. No over-scheduling in sight, no “Tiger Mother” forcing them to play the violin. That being said, I find the The triple package book, presents a compelling hypothesis to account for their success: the majority are immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, and the families come from the groups the book mentions.
In conclusion, my sample is too tiny and biased to draw any generalizations but feel free to expand the list and post your conclusions in the comments.