Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

If the goal is to map the global status quo on education, the answer is to go country by country and ideally visit as many as possible.

This was the path mayself and others followed when we wanted to map the current state of global mineral and resource extraction. ie Grind.

Particularly during the Cold War years emphasis was placed by major powers on intellectual and physical achievements, countries dedicated resources to hothousing swimmers, runners, chess players, musicians, etc.

If your specific interest is "gifted" children, TT wrote this some years past: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/advice-on-gifte...

I'd add to that a number of peer children with various gifts I grew up with never wanted to (for example) play the violin ever again. Push too hard and you can easily blow it.

More generally, advancing children en masse is likely still "done best" by Finland, a country considered by many to have the best general education system. All the teachers are university educated in + "education" (the act of educating) and they adopt a policy of stability, resourcing, active teaching (teacher lectures class) and near equal time for student activity (half the class time spent by students doing stuff for themselves related to topic).

Policy wise, it's not all about the super brains - the trades are hard and demand skills, it's good to have parallel streams; applied STEM for some, apprentiships for others, AND (in my opinion at least) a mixing of the two - giant autonomous 240 tonne trucks don't build themselves, someone has to lathe out massive hydraulic cylinders and control rods and levers that others have to control via funky math stuff.

Here in W.Australia the capital city Perth has a number of specialist high schools - Performing Arts ones that feed into WAAPA (post high school level performance), an aviation focused high school my son attended where each intake year builds their own aircraft to fly ( https://www.kentstreetshs.wa.edu.au/aviation ), etc.

These are state schools (free) that are general schools (like all the others) with additional Specialist Programs.

There are some 190+ odd countries about the globe, it would take some time to table out the education programmes in each.

The logic in my claim is that the overwhelming majority of people will reach nowhere even remotely near to their genetic potential in literally anything. You can see this in any endeavor where performance can be objectively measured - chess is the obvious one. A 2000 rated player is not much more than a strong amateur, but that already leaves one in like the 90th+ percentile for a game that millions of people work and study at.

It's not like the other 90% of people lack the intelligence or whatever else to be much stronger than they are, but it requires extensive dedication, work, and suffering that many just uninterested in tolerating for the sake of improving at a single domain. I think your example largely proves the point. Anybody of average intelligence can obviously excel at undergraduate math if they're willing to dedicate themselves to it, but many people aren't. If somebody was failing at math it's probably because they were just treating it like you might e.g. literature, and trying to do cram sessions relatively shortly before each exam, whereas by the time somebody gets to stuff like diff eq math starts turning more into a puzzle game that requires developing things on a subconscious/intuitive level.

This was not undergraduate math in my case, but I still don't agree.

I don't think anyone of average intelligence can excel at undergraduate math. It of course depends on the degree and the school. Can anyone with average intelligence excel at an undergraduate math course in community college for their psychology degree? Probably yes. But an undergraduate math course at oxford as part of a maths degree? Not for sure not.

I think you are severely underestimating how much intelligence factors in how fast and even what at all you can learn. Take the opposite end of the spectrum. The US army rejects candidates with an IQ of ~85 or lower. Because they have found this group cannot contribute meaningfully. Let that sink in. Just a drop of 15 IQ points means the US army has decided you cannot be effectively taught anything to a minimum degree of competence. Now consider that the average IQ of a mathematician is 130 (https://realiqtest.webflow.io/posts/iq-by-occupation-a-compr...).

I don't think it's a common thing in any public LLM benchmarks or in any standard QA datasets. Maybe in internal stuff at AI firms.

I'm speaking of math majors, or fields with a heavy math requirement, of course. Diff eq is not required anywhere, as far as I know at least, for non-technical majors. As for the army, I wouldn't just hand-wave away soldiering. You're talking about people being put in high pressure situations with ever-shifting dynamics, potentially against a human adversary, where lives are at stake. And they think everybody except the bottom ~32% of society is fit for this task.

I'd certainly expect an average person who dedicates his life to mathematics to end up with a higher than average IQ largely because while IQ is a useful measure, it's not an independent g factor. Studying mathematics is going to absolutely help train your brain in many areas that are also beneficial for performance in IQ exams. So for instance, some studies have shown that each additional year of education, relative to a fixed base, can causally contribute 1-5 additional IQ points. [1] So our person in question would almost certainly expect to see a significant and measurable IQ increase.

And FWIW I'm rather on the opposite extreme of those who argue for some sort of tabula rasa. I fully acknowledge dramatic innate differences between individuals, but I'm largely arguing that such differences only become major factors for people who approach their genetic potential in something, which most people will never get even remotely near, simply because the amount of dedication and sacrifice it takes is something that very few people are willing to accept.

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088505