Mihaly Barasz is an IMO gold medalist perfect scorer. From what I’ve seen personally, I’d guess that Paul Christiano is better than him at math. I forget what Marcello’s prodigy points were in but I think it was some sort of computing olympiad. All should have some sort of verified performance feat far in excess of the listed educational attainment.
These days I’d describe myself as a decision theorist, with a strong interest in human rationality. Boasting of my mathematical talent in that company seems inappropriate; I don’t have comparable prodigy markers (well, some very early ones of similar statistical rareness, but that was at easier problems at a younger age, and I was not properly developed as a pure math prodigy since then). I’ve often played a key role in figuring out which math to invent, but have relatively less comparative advantage at proving things within a given system once invented, unless the key happens to be checking laws against a concrete example which I seem to do earlier than most mathematicians. What I really do doesn’t seem to have very much of a name, and can’t realistically be described in a document like this one.
This isn’t something that is normally listed as a qualification. It essentially signals math fandom rather than math and including it in a list of qualifications sounds very unprofessional. The signaling isn’t great here.
“All should have some sort of verified performance feat far in excess of the listed educational attainment”
A relevant point, I’m debating adding that. The audience I’d had in mind when first putting this together was people trying to decide which courses, schools, or training would help them get into x-risk research. For that crowd, knowing who the prodigies are and what performance metrics they did well on what wouldn’t be that useful. But I realize that there may be very young, very high-talent people reading a list like this and trying to decide where they should focus their efforts, and they might be interested in knowing others like them ended up in x-risk.
Mihaly Barasz is an IMO gold medalist perfect scorer. From what I’ve seen personally, I’d guess that Paul Christiano is better than him at math. I forget what Marcello’s prodigy points were in but I think it was some sort of computing olympiad. All should have some sort of verified performance feat far in excess of the listed educational attainment.
These days I’d describe myself as a decision theorist, with a strong interest in human rationality. Boasting of my mathematical talent in that company seems inappropriate; I don’t have comparable prodigy markers (well, some very early ones of similar statistical rareness, but that was at easier problems at a younger age, and I was not properly developed as a pure math prodigy since then). I’ve often played a key role in figuring out which math to invent, but have relatively less comparative advantage at proving things within a given system once invented, unless the key happens to be checking laws against a concrete example which I seem to do earlier than most mathematicians. What I really do doesn’t seem to have very much of a name, and can’t realistically be described in a document like this one.
Anna Salamon has an Erdos number of 2.
This isn’t something that is normally listed as a qualification. It essentially signals math fandom rather than math and including it in a list of qualifications sounds very unprofessional. The signaling isn’t great here.
It’s interesting but not impressive. The only Erdos number that has ever been a useful gauge of extraordinary skill is 0.
“All should have some sort of verified performance feat far in excess of the listed educational attainment”
A relevant point, I’m debating adding that. The audience I’d had in mind when first putting this together was people trying to decide which courses, schools, or training would help them get into x-risk research. For that crowd, knowing who the prodigies are and what performance metrics they did well on what wouldn’t be that useful. But I realize that there may be very young, very high-talent people reading a list like this and trying to decide where they should focus their efforts, and they might be interested in knowing others like them ended up in x-risk.