Does anyone know any kid geniuses?

Phew, I was really worried this was for some kind of SIAI kid-cloning experiment.

His life experience has been pretty unusual. He doesn't really know what it's like to be challenged in school.

If that's really unusual in Australian schools, they are vastly better than Israeli ones or, from what I hear, most others in the Western world. (Possibly excepting some expensive, private ones.) (I realize this isn't the reason you call him a genius.)

I was certainly never challenged in school, and neither were my friends. This was not because I was a genius, however, but because the teachers and textbook authors were of the grade better used as landfill. Sadly I had no encouragement from adults and couldn't switch schools or drop out, and I didn't have the will or resourcefulness to do anything useful in my free time.

This kid is very fortunate in having you as a friend. With the resources available on the Internet today, having "official" approval and encouragement in his intellectual development is half the hard work done.

Thank you for helping raise the next generation well.

Another solution may be for him to get involved in "smart kid" camps/teams where he can meet people like him (and be challenged intellectually!). These include the various Olympiads (Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Informatics, Mathematics), and others like the National Computer Science School, the National Mathematics Summer School (NMSS) and National Youth Science Forum.

I went to NMSS (twice in fact!) and I can't say enough good things about it; both intellectually and socially (I met most of my closest friends there).

However, 14 is probably a little young for those specific camps, but I know that people can be involved in the Olympiads from quite young, and I'm sure there are other camps around. (This is assuming an interest in science/maths.)

See:

http://www.davidsongifted.org/

For children with IQs in the top .1% Members get access to a listing of other members.

Actually, to expand on challenging yourself - when I see someone smart - I don't think much of them. Majority of smart people never achieve anything noteworthy; they're nothing like geniuses we see when we look into the past and grade by accomplishment. You only call them geniuses because they do well on a test on which geniuses do well. If I see a smart person who challenges himself - there is always a lot of things this person tried, some successfully, some stalled (if you always succeed you aren't choosing tasks hard enough!) - those people can go very far.

The notion that school must challenge people like him, that's rather new. If you look at all the accomplished scientists - none of them were challenged by the school system; they had their own labs in the basements, doing stuff; they were studying mathematics at university level when they were 12 (and actually doing exercises, not 'i've read a book, okay'); that sort of stuff. Nobody was baby-fed baby challenges. To do all enrichment things is to study all the advanced math (linear algebra, calculus, statistics, etc) at age 12; you can do that even in a fairly backwards place. In advanced place - there will be adults baby feeding you baby challenges of no importance, wasting your time doing what they think is accomplishments appropriate for your age, but what doesn't train you anything. Science fairs for example. There's no use doing baby science; the genius needs to study important stuff (math mostly), and perhaps mess with idk electronics in the basement, and then he'll be more than well equipped to do actual science better than adults with degrees (because more intelligent).

Does he have some sort of lab in basement doing interesting stuff out of curiosity? Or alternatively, making computer programs because he wants to see if he could? Or something similar?

My first thought, if he's not being challenged at school ... he needs some project that will teach him what intellectual work is. Because the brilliant kid unchallenged by school who goes to university and suddenly and disastrously discovers he never learnt how to think as work is a stereotype for a reason. (I speak as a smart kid who went to a very good school in Australia and experienced this disaster.)

I know at least four people who started college by age 15. They're not "kid" geniuses anymore though -- the youngest is 16 and slowly going through college part-time, while the oldest is in his 30s and a full math professor at Arizona.

I don't know about the upbringing of the other three, but one attended a program where taking classes mutliple grade-levels ahead is the norm (though no-one else learned calculus in 3rd grade), and attended Canada/USA Mathcamp during the summers of his undergrad.

I second the Olympiads. Terry Tao famously represented Australia at the IMO at age 10, so he's definitely old enough.

He needs to be doing something challenging on his own, like studying math. Doing something is as much about having the drive to challenge yourself, as about having the smarts. Smart people who don't challenge themselves don't get anywhere, they do perform well on IQ test but they never develop intelligence for things outside the IQ test. It's like having good athletic genes, vs becoming a world champion. (edit: or actually worse, because in intellectual field you altogether can't rely on others to challenge you).

I'll second the "smart kid" summer camps, and trying to work up the ladder of olympiads.

I'd say lesswrong is a good website for him, as well as artofproblemsolving.com

Jake Barnett has become somewhat famous recently, although I doubt he's available for personal friendships. I hope you've introduced your friend to the sequences, or at least HPMOR!

There are places on the Internet, if one is so inclined, to socialize and talk shop with other intelligent kids.

I'd recommend the ones I came from, like Gifted Haven and Cogito, but the former is a tiny community (really nice, but there are maybe a dozen regulars, total) and the latter requires talent search scores (although I might be able to bend an ear if you can't find one).

From what I've seen the AoPS community looks pretty good, but I have no personal experience.

Not quite on your original topic, but my own experience of intelligent and gifted children is that if they get into the mindset that they are different from other children at an early age they tend not to socialise with them, and never learn full social skills as they grow up, which are extremely important for adulthood. I think people (particularly on LW sadly) underestimate the importance of generalised social skills, and how much can be learned from interacting with people who are less 'intelligent'*

While meeting other 'gifted' kids with similar life experiences would definitely be good as you've said, it would also be good to see if you can arrange for him to have activities with other kids his age. One possibility might be to find activities where he's not operating at a much higher level than them (maybe sport/arts/music?) so he can interact without that being a barrier. Remember however clever he is, developmentally and psychologically he's still 14 and has a lot more in common with people his age than adults.

*(Scare quotes as there are a lot of issues with defining general intelligence, and it doesn't necessarily correlate that well with academic success at that age.)

If he is considering or interested in a career in academia – especially in science or math – he might want to start doing research over the summer. 14 is young, but not too young to start. Besides the obvious benefits from getting experience and publications, this is also what he needs to do to win the major high school/undergraduate research awards (I don't know about Australia, but in the US, these awards are: Siemens, Intel, Goldwater).

Getting started on a successful research project in high school is not trivial, and is impeded by a lack of information from the typical educational sources one encounters before college. One way is to independently find a faculty member who is willing to act as a research advisor; it is probably best to find someone who has prior experience with this (a publishing record with high school students as co-authors would be very promising – if they care about this, they will mention it in their CV or webpage).

Another way to start, which worked for me, is to get involved in summer camps that give students research opportunities. I know there are quite a few in the US, and most of these accept international students. I believe the most prestigious and competitive science/math program is the Research Science Institute at MIT (according to one of faculty mentors: "The typical RSI student is comparable to the very best MIT sophomore physics major."), but it seems like they only accept students going into their final year of high school study (i.e., rising high school seniors).

Some summer math camps offer research opportunities to returning students. I did research as a second-year student at the Honors Summer Math Camp (HSMC), and I can attest that good research work gets done there – since 2006, at least four research papers get selected each year as semifinalists in the Siemens Competition. All students who are invited back for a second year are assigned a research project and faculty mentor if they wish to be. Ross and PROMYS are similar in math content to HSMC (i.e., number theory for all first-year students), but I'm not sure what research opportunities they provide. [Edit: Just remembered that HSMC only offers research projects to US citizens because these projects enter the Siemens Competition, which unfortunately only accepts submissions from US citizens... This might be worth keeping in mind for international students.]

Regarding age: I can only speak about HSMC as I am only familiar with that, but I expect other programs not to differ too much. HSMC recommends applicants to be at least rising high school sophomores, but I know there were several rising freshman who were probably 14 during my second year there. Some of these young students went on to be regional finalists in the Siemens Competition for research done during their second year there. So some 15 year old students certainly have the ability to produce a good research paper.

Regarding research: There are pretty much limitless problems in math that can be approached by someone with only a (pre?)undergraduate-level knowledge of a single field. But it would be very helpful to have a mentor who can pick out suitable problems and provide any necessary guidance. Computational fields in the sciences may also be suitable for students with some programming skills. This is what I worked on for my first research project – I simply wrote a simulation of gas diffusion in nanocomposites, ran that for a month on a supercomputing grid, co-authored the results in a research paper, and that was enough to be selected as a regional finalist in the Siemens Competition. Before that project, the only programming experience I had was from my first summer at HSMC, so one could get started very quickly on a successful computational/programming project.

I know a French 10-year-old. Too young and too far away?

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I cannot say that I know such a kid genius in person. However, you and your friend might both be interested in this recent article about a young genius: The Boy Who Played With Fusion.

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