![]() that sounds like it's coming from a 17-year-old, not a math prodigy, not a man trapped in a boy's body, but the real R.J. I'm not just some guy immersed in mathematics. LIM: Maybe, I guess, for being a nice guy. So with that in mind, I ask him, what would you like to be recognized for? has narrowed his college choices to Stanford and MIT. needs to realize he's got time, lots of time. It's a chance to explore and figure things out. SANCHEZ: That's what college is all about, says Smith. ![]() Even psychology may end up being a direction he'd want to go in, but he could also just keep being a math genius. This is, as his mother says, a man of few words and of depth. is an extremely sophisticated, mature, and profound writer. MARGARET SMITH (Assistant Professor of English, Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities): R.J. R.J.'s English teacher at the academy, Margaret Smith, says he definitely has a flip side. He says he wants to be free to choose whatever he decides to be. loves being around other smart kids, but he yearns deeply to be seen as something more than a math prodigy. And those are the kind of people I really enjoy. LIM: Part of doing math is partly hedonistic kind of thing, but I feel like I want - I need to be surrounded by people I can really talk to or people I think are admirable. says Mark was somebody he could relate to without feeling like a freak. There he met Mark Zhang, his teammate for the Siemens Competition. remained a top student with nearly perfect standardized test scores. SANCHEZ: Remarkably, in the middle of that deep, deep depression, R.J. And there was probably a period where I just refused to do any work, and I just stopped. LIM: Actually, there's a time in tenth grade where I felt really lonely, and I just became really unmotivated to do anything at all. says the move to Indianapolis was especially hard and disorienting. ![]() And they acknowledge that hopscotching around the country every two to four years didn't help. And while his impressive academic achievements early on made his parents proud, they saw how their son's brilliance also isolated him from other children his age. And they said I was like the human calculator or something. And I guess that's how I got a head start on other kids. LIM: It probably all started when my dad, he taught me how to add and subtract with fruits and stuff. mathematics has been as much a burden as a gift. Still, it's clear that here at the academy, R.J. SHOBE: Even though I'm a discreet mathematician as opposed to continuous, which means I'm kind of the same general area. SANCHEZ: That's Franklin Shobe, R.J.'s mentor at the Indiana Academy for Science, Math, and Humanities - a public boarding school for gifted students. Now, there's a lot here I don't understand. FRANKLIN SHOBE (Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities): It certainly looks impressive. And even if he had, I wouldn't have understood it anyway. SANCHEZ: I can never get him to give me an answer. LIM: Well, let's just say that the project didn't require that much background. The title of his project: "Previously Unknown Parts of the Greene-Kleitman Partition for the Tamari Lattice." I ask R.J., so what is that? He hesitates. From that mind came R.J.'s contribution to this year's Siemens math and science competition. SANCHEZ: It's his intellect, of course, that far surpasses that of a typical 17-year-old. LIM: I've always been catching up with my body. Straight shoulder-length black hair hides his eyes and frames the face of a serious young man trapped in a slender prepubescent boy's body. It's just easier to say, I guess.ĬLAUDIO SANCHEZ: R.J. RAPHAEL-JOEL LIM: (Winner, Siemens Competition): My name is Raphael-Joel Lim, and most who know me call me R.J. One of those 17-year-old finalists so intrigued NPR's Claudio Sanchez that he went to Indiana to meet him. Chyan beat out a number of teenage finalists who discovered new strategies to regulate cholesterol, developed cutting-edge gene research, and even solved a 30-year-old math problem. His research focused on a way to prevent the spread of infections in hospitals. It's called the Siemens Competition in Math and Technology, and the individual winner is Wen Chyan of Denton, Texas. Prestigious may be another way to say the winner gets $100,000. We now know one of the winners of a prestigious math and science award for high school students. I'm Renee Montagne.Īnd I'm Steve Inskeep.
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