I find this interesting with a 2e pg son and thinking about the childhoods of people such as Stephen Hawking and someone who I knew briefly that worked at a very high astrophysics level (ie. helped discover the Higgs Boson and worked at the CERN, etc.).
I haven't read Hawking's bio, but I believe that Hawking didn't show much aptitude or display his remarkable abilities until much later in life. Ditto for the astrophysicists I briefly knew. I asked his recent widow if she knew whether her husband was like my son (ie. flying through algebra at 8 yrs old) but she said that he wasn't like that at all as a child.
I'm not sure if these two individuals (Hawking and the other astrophysicist) just didn't display pg signs, if they were late bloomers, didn't put up a stink in school or something else was going on. But it's somewhat hard for a mere mortal to wrap their head around. I know the astrophysicist, who I knew, was a very unassuming, shy, quiet, gentle man who did not wear his achievements on his sleeve. So it's entirely possible that perhaps he just slipped under the radar with his earlier education and then excelled once at university and as an adult. I don't know.
