Think of all the millions of dollars spent on immersion and tutoring by rich parents. How many of their kids produce anything of noteworthiness at any age, let alone so young as he did? This is 99% the product of IQ/talent. It's a huuuge leap to go from merely having an advanced math education to actually solving or proving important stuff. This is mathematician-caliber work, not just someone who took advanced courses at a university or had parent's help.
Eh, the kind of immersion and tutoring that rich parents can buy doesn’t remotely compare to having two professional mathematicians as parents.
The tutors for rich kids are likely to be local grad students who meet with the kids at most a few hours a week; you can’t exactly hire a fields medalist for tutoring. Perhaps more importantly, those rich kids are not getting singular training in math, they’re getting tutored in a gazillion things so they can be “well-rounded”. Also, those kids are not likely to develop the intrinsic motivation to do this stuff because their parents are still the ones instilling values in them. Those values are going to be “go to law school” or “start a business” or “pursue the arts” or some other avatar of “make as much money/social capital as possible”. Those values are likely not going to be “study math and prove theorems because it’s interesting”.
And if you did, you would surely get results. That isn't really happening at any sort of scale today. Compare to Alexander the Great, who was tutored by Aristotle himself.
> Think of all the millions of dollars spent on immersion and tutoring by rich parents.
The kind of tutoring these provide is nowhere near as immersive as the elite one-on-one education that was historically common in upper-class households.
