Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion famous accelerants

I'd like to start a thread discussing the educational paths of intellectually accomplished people, especially those who were accelerated.

Let me just say that as a chemist, this is SO not what I thought that thread title meant.

Half a century ago, working quietly in a New Orleans laboratory, Ruth Benerito helped smooth the fabric of modern life. In so doing, she helped liberate people from hours of household drudgery.

A chemist long affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Benerito helped perfect modern wrinkle-free cotton, colloquially known as permanent press, in work that she and her colleagues began in the late 1950s.

Widely available since the mid-1960s, wrinkle-free cotton is considered one of the most significant technological developments of the 20th century. For her role, Dr. Benerito was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008.

Dr. Benerito died on Saturday at 97.

[...]

Ruth Mary Rogan was born in New Orleans on Jan. 12, 1916. At 15, she entered H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, then the women’s college of Tulane University. She received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry there in 1935, followed by a master’s in the field from Tulane. She taught at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., and at Newcomb and Tulane, before earning a Ph.D. chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Born in 1946, Yellen (who kept her name after she married) attended Fort Hamilton High School in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn.

We tracked down two of her high school classmates to talk about what it was like growing up with her.

"A classic '60s liberal," said Charles Saydah, a retired journalist who served with Yellen on the school paper (Yellen was editor in chief), and also ran in the same social circles. "She has great faith in education as an answer to a lot of societal problems."

Susan Grosart, a retired school committee chair in Massachusetts, said she met Yellen in 7th grade when they were both "special progress" students, a program that let gifted youngsters breeze through junior high in two years.

[...]

Grosart recalls seeing Yellen after they'd completed their first semester at college— Yellen attended Pembroke, the then-women's section of Brown University — and she mentioned she'd taken an economics class.

"She was like, on fire," Grosart said.

"She just loved economics from the first minute she started studying it. She lectured me continually about different economic topics, and you could just tell she'd found her passion."

My junior high teachers [in Newton, MA] soon realized that
I was bored with the regular curriculum, so
they let me sit in the back of the classroom and
study on my own. What made this experience
particularly nice was that another student, a
very pretty girl, was given the same privilege,
and we worked together. The arrangement
was that we could learn at our own pace without
being responsible for the day-to-day material
but had to take the important exams.
Several dedicated teachers at Warren Junior
High helped us when questions arose, particularly
with science and mathematics.With this
freedom, we explored whatever interested us
and, of course, did much more work than we
would have done if we were only concerned
with passing the required subjects.