I was trying to find out if Kit Armstrong had his PhD but it is not clear. He finished Chapman U in CA when he was 10 but seemed to move into a non degree world where he just studies with the best, like now he lives in London to take music, though commutes to NY also for a music coach and studies pure mathematics in Paris. Though he did graduate work when he was 11 and 12 in at U of Penn. So when you are this high in IQ, doors open wide and the path is one you choose.
"Doing graduate work" doesn't have to mean doing research, though, let alone the kind of sustained contribution that gets you a PhD. UPenn has plenty of taught courses at graduate level, and I'm not at all surprised that a young PG child could do that kind of thing. (Indeed, DS7 has done some graduate work, come to think of it, in the sense that he's learned quite a lot of material that is only ever taught in graduate-level courses :-)
Don't get me wrong, Kit Armstrong is impressive! He's just not a counterexample to my tentative claim that even most very very very PG children will not be in a position to complete a PhD before the age of about, say, 17, more for social/emotional than for intellectual reasons.
