Relatively ordinary. My teachers wanted me to go into grad school, which had sort of been my plan my whole life, but i had authority issues and it didn’t seem like a good idea. I also enjoyed programming so I let myself get pulled into internet programming, landing at AOL after a few jobs at smaller places. Since then I have been programming, except for a stint as a stay at home dad. My youngest just went to college and I have enrolled in a masters program in math at a local uni, weirdly enough. Learning math is still a profoundly fun thing for me.
Knowing a lot of maths has improved my life a lot but didn’t let me discover fusion or anything. I have written a lot of software and improved more software and helped people learn about how to understand software systems, but that has all been in service to keeping my family afloat; now that responsibility is lessening, I might try again to have a more maths career.
I was also sexually abused by a close relative from age four to about age six, so probably I would not have been up to the rigors of a doctoral program or an academic career. Till I got my self together, the scarcity of good programmers in the job market gave me the buffer I needed to succeed despite the authority issues. But the accelerated math was solely a blessing.
A lot of the people from the math camp (Duke’s Talent Identification Program) have had very solid careers but so far as I know not many Nobel prizes or Fields Medalists or whatever.
Knowing a lot of maths has improved my life a lot but didn’t let me discover fusion or anything. I have written a lot of software and improved more software and helped people learn about how to understand software systems, but that has all been in service to keeping my family afloat; now that responsibility is lessening, I might try again to have a more maths career.
I was also sexually abused by a close relative from age four to about age six, so probably I would not have been up to the rigors of a doctoral program or an academic career. Till I got my self together, the scarcity of good programmers in the job market gave me the buffer I needed to succeed despite the authority issues. But the accelerated math was solely a blessing.
A lot of the people from the math camp (Duke’s Talent Identification Program) have had very solid careers but so far as I know not many Nobel prizes or Fields Medalists or whatever.