Thu 26 December 2019:
At six, a boy from South Korea makes solving complex math problems such as gamma functions and Euler’s functions appear as easy as playing a game of tic-tac-toe.
Meanwhile, this writer struggled to remember if the word “sentence” was spelt with an “a” or an “e” when she was of the same age, and actually still relies on autocorrect to correct that mistake.
Although he has only got about 7,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel now, Lee Jeong-woo has got all the makings of a potential YouTube celebrity.
If that isn’t enough to prove his arithmetical prowess, he even managed to solve a problem from the MIT Integration Bee — an annual math competition that sets out to pit the undergrads in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against each other — in under 15 minutes.
We’re not even going to try and pretend we actually understand whatever the boy’s writing.
Fortunately for us, Lee has full-length lectures explaining the intricacies of such complex numbers and applied sciences. Yes, that even includes a question from the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition — another university-level competition in the US.
For desperate university students struggling to make sense out of your math assignment, Lee might just be your saviour. If you understand Korean, that is.
In some ways, he reminds us of several other child geniuses such as 12-year-old Mawgan ‘Mog’ Stinchcombe and 10-year-old Sbahle Zwane. Although they’re just as spectacular, none of them is quite as young as Lee.
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