While his judgement may be that typical for a child his age (or perhaps slightly younger due to AS), he is clearly profoundly gifted in math/science. While my IQ isn’t as high and I wasn’t achieving as much at that age, I was doing college freshman level math, science, reading, and writing and denied a grade skip or academic accleration of any kind (apart from AP in high school, which was kind of a joke since they only had the algebra-based physics and the easy calculus at my school) on the basis of social skills deficits due to Asperger’s. The frustration and boredom led to my losing the motivation to achieve in school, and doing the bare minimum to get an A (then B, then stopped caring about grades altogether in junior year). I spent all my class time socializing or writing science fiction novels and poetry.

According to the article, he even has a girlfriend. That doesn’t say too much about his social skills, but at that age I was a pariah in my school, with only a handful of people who would engage me in conversation or respond to my initiation, and the one who people would frequently ask me out as a joke (I always saw through the charade before they finished, but that did not deter them a bit). Personally, I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 17 while taking classes at community college, and until I switched schools at age 15 and made a bunch of long-time friends the first day, I had only had two close friends, both between ages 12 and 14. Provided he has psychological guidance and interactions with social peers (such as through organized group activities and ASD social skills groups), it probably won’t be much of a problem.

It’s important that kids who get into college early and do so well are not pressured into keeping in the same field, or moving directly to grad school, or whatever. Many kids with such precocious abilities are internally motivated to keep going on that path, but it’s important for them to know they always have the option to change course, that it isn’t failing, and that it isn’t their obligation to humanity to use their brains for important discoveries. No matter how capable and motivated, that is too much of a burden for a child. Hopefully his parents are taking this sort of approach.

As for autism and Asperger’s being different entities, I would tend to agree, except that the lines between what is technically defined as Asperger’s and what is technically defined as HFA are not terribly accurate way of differentiating. There are plenty of people with Asperger’s who are not better at math, for instance – many, in fact, have much stronger verbal abilities than mathematical, and both areas may be in average or somewhat below average IQ range (but not too much lower, by definition).

A good chunk of people who meet the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s probably have a condition more in common with the majority of cases of HFA or PDD-NOS in terms of the genetic cause and/or general features in how the brain is different, but get the Asperger’s label because they didn’t have a speech delay (I have read of many people diagnosed with Asperger’s as adults even when they had a significant speech delay as a child, and would more properly be classified as HFA according to DSM-IV-TR – someone with the “classic autism” picture may grow up to strongly resemble the “classic Asperger’s” picture). There are adults with AS who can’t function independently, despite good verbal skills.

That doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same condition, of course – far from it. Most probably we should draw the lines in different places, but we don’t have enough data to draw the lines in the write places most cases (apart from specific, defined syndromes, but the subtypes documented by genetic/brain function patterns are dwarfed by those we cannot classify except as idiopathic, at least in the clinical setting).

So while I support considering different forms of autism under the ASD umbrella, there are, almost without question, different definable subtypes (we already know of a few but they’re rare, though genetic patterns indicate there are probably some more common subtypes), but we don’t know enough to reliably divide and categorize people into the different subtypes, even though we know enough that there are different types. More genetic and neuroscience studies should sheld light on this in future time.

Since a label is only as good as it is practical to be useful, a group of ill-defined conditions are probably best described at this time by an umbrella label. Until then, treatment/services really need to be based on the individual difficulties/strengths (which it is supposed to be now in theory, and I’m not too optimistic that the change will do as much in practice as it should). In any case, research definitely is needed in defining subtypes, which would help determine if any totally unrelated conditions are being lumped together, as I suspect is likely.

There are plenty of college students and adults who can’t do a lot of things. Some of that is due to raw ability, some aptitude, application and the quality of the education.

The typical US student does a lot of math at a much later stage in high school than occurs in other western countries – much of it even deferred to college level. If you’ve got aptitude and willing teachers better than average, you can easily tackle this material 5 years ahead of the (non-US) curriculum slated for the average student. Even that does not automatically place you amongst the front-runners of a tertiary mathematics class.

I would also point out that aside from the impairment in language development, the clinical criteria for Asperger’s and Autistic disorders are very similar:

http://www.firstsigns.org/screening/DSM4.htm#AS

I therefore think it is a bit hasty to assume that Asperger’s disorder is a distinct entity neurobiologically from autism, as Steve suggests. A quick Pubmed search suggests that in the rare situations where a genetic basis for an ASD is known, you can see family members presenting both with an Asperger’s and autistic phenotype:

PMID: 20162629

Hopefully this “boy genius” will be able to develop his mathematical abilities into a fruitful career, despite whatever social difficulties he has related to his Asperger’s diagnosis.

Fundamentally, there is no reason why a 12 year-old of average intelligence cannot understand Calculus. The main reason people have problems with Calculus is just that they haven’t properly been taught the underlying concepts. Leonhard Euler had the solution over a century ago when he said that problems in Calculus were most often due to a weak grasp of algebra. And I would extend his insight by saying that problems in algebra are due to a weak grasp of basic arithmetic. The problems rarely manifest themselves immediately, but poor early training in these subjects will cause problems later on when, thanks to government-mandated standards of ‘progress’, it is impossible to remediate the students. Ideally, we’d have people whose mathematical expertise is beyond question to teach elementary school children, but instead we direct the least intelligent of education majors to elementary education under the delusion that “anyone” can properly teach the basics of math and English grammar.

As Steve says, if you cannot communicate with the world around you, the benefits of your intellect are lost.

I understand that you like the idea of intellectual ability getting some attention for a change, but this really isn’t a positive sort of attention from my perspective.

Throwing kids in front of a camera to show off their skills/abilities, be it athletic (“musclebound toddler”), or intellectual (“boy genius #357″), or asthetic (beauty pagents) always has a freak show vibe that is distasteful to me. These are children and throwing them in front of a camera like this is really not fair, and I’m not sure how this attention can be a good thing (for the kid or anyone else).