Paul Dietz, a slender youth in wire-rimmed glasses, loves war games of all kinds—from World War II platoon fights to dungeons and dragons. Says he: "I like to look at the mistakes commanders made in the past, as an intellectual exercise." Colin Camerer has a more direct interest in combat, since he lists as his main concerns "business and power." He adds: "Someone's going to be making decisions, and frankly I want to be there." Eugene Stark, by contrast, has a more modest policy: "I try to appear as normal as possible. If you go around broadcasting that you're a weirdo, then people look at you like you're a weirdo."
Testing Feat. The reason why some people might look on the three students as a little odd is that they graduated last week from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 17. All have IQs of more than 150. And all three—along with five other precocious seniors—were found at the early age of 12 or 13 to be mathematical wizards, capable of feats such as scoring well on algebra tests without ever having taken the subject.
Their graduation is a milestone in a unique program at Johns Hopkins, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. It was begun in 1971 by Psychology Professor Julian Stanley, 58, who remembered his boredom in Georgia public schools and decided "to save these kids from the same experience." Stanley, a statistician, sought out 12-to 13-year-old children in the Baltimore area who had already shown promise in math. He asked them to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test normally given to college-bound high school students. The result: a group of seven boys scored well over 700 (out of a possible 800), a feat matched by only 5% of 18-year-old males. Besides Dietz, Camerer and Stark, the test also identified two other youngsters who are graduating from Johns Hopkins this year—Michael Kotschenreuther, 18, and Robert Addison, 19—as mathematically gifted. Stanley also helped other youthful math wizards, whom his testing turned up, get into other colleges. Among them: Eric Jablow, 15, who this year became the youngest boy ever to graduate from New York's Brooklyn College.
As Stanley's program has become increasingly well known, hundreds of seventh-graders have been pouring in from a wider and wider area to take his tests and sample what Stanley calls a "smorgasbord of educationally accelerated opportunities." Some, who live near by, are ferried by their parents to special two-hour Saturday tutorial classes at Johns Hopkins. Tutored by other prodigies just a few years older than they, these gifted students now race through advanced algebra and geometry. Others leapfrog over grades, and some will attend a special summer session at Johns Hopkins.
"We don't have any particular program," says Stanley, whose recruits now total about 500. "If you're gifted and motivated, we'll help you do anything that fits you." The purpose of this speedup, says Stanley, is "so that mathematically talented youths can devote their most productive years to research." He adds: "Lots of people in this world worry mostly about those who have low ability. Somebody has to worry about the gifted."