Speaking of child prodigies--I've noticed something extremely odd about childhood ability in my own experiences.<p>I got a 5 on the Calculus AB AP exam when I was ~10 years old and around the same time got a ~1490 (I don't remember exactly) on the SAT. 6 years later, I did no better on the SAT than I did when I was a preteen and I didn't feel as if I was any better at math than I had been 6 years earlier.<p>Despite the fact that I had done so well at math as a child, I was never competitive in the higher-level math competitions like the AMC and AIME, where I consistently scored mediocre (~110 on the AMC, ~0-1 on the AIME). I went to school with plenty of classmates who scored near-perfect on both competitions and yet had not been nearly as much of a supposed "prodigy" as I was.<p>Today, I doubt I am even <i>above average</i> at my college; I am relieved to have simply passed the math courses required for my major with barely-tolerable grades. And yet whenever I read stories of "real" prodigies, I never see anything like this--they always seem to continue their trend and prove to be brilliant mathematicians. Or is this selection bias?<p>I still don't fully understand what happened. Does mathematical ability plateau at an early age? Is there something special about courses beyond basic calculus that are inherently more difficult? Did my skill simply stop developing because I lost interest?
The article in text format (rather than MS Word):<p><a href="http://gist.github.com/raw/190081/6731e974f7175b26e351b40dffb433bd75d1ec55/gistfile1.txt" rel="nofollow">http://gist.github.com/raw/190081/6731e974f7175b26e351b40dff...</a>