[RMarcus]

Looks like he got a master's degree from UIUC and did some research on FFT implementations. Seems to have been successful. What makes you say he was 'considered a "bad student"'?

(This is a genuine question. I've never met Alex in person, but if an applicant to my lab spent their free time diving into SIMD implementations and breaking records for computing mathematical constants, I'd rush to hire them. Not that either of those two things is a requirement, of course.)

[kolbe]

It's in his bio.

"However, ever since grade school, I've always sucked in terms of grades and standardized tests. I graduated from Palo Alto High School in the bottom quartile among all the college-bound students. My GPA was barely a 3.0 at graduation, so it was somewhat miraculous that I got accepted into Northwestern University at all."[1]

I know he has a masters and all, but he is spectacular. Hundreds of thousands of people have masters degrees. He is more impressive than 99% of professors, and academia doesn't even acknowledge him as a peer of them.

[1] http://www.numberworld.org/about/ayee/

[nocoiner]

The fact that he got into Northwestern is proof in itself that the “system” didn’t consider him to be a bad student. It actually seems like the system did a pretty good job of identifying sheer intellectual horsepower and potential despite the self-professed low GPA and standardized test scores.

[kolbe]

In the grand hierarchy of college admissions committees ranking people, "getting into northwestern" means roughly "the 20,000th best student in his class year."

[dahinds]

and that was a "catastrophic" outcome? When I think of "catastrophic", it would be something like ending up institutionalized, or dead, not ranked in the top 1% of college applicants.

[kolbe]

I'll put it this way. He clearly loves teaching. He's better at it than almost any teacher I ever had. He's clearly very intelligent. He loves doing work that interests him, as opposed to lucrative professional tasks.

I'm not in his head, but it sounds like his ideal job would be professor.

Let's presume that second paragraph is true. He doesn't have that job, let alone have it at a top university. He hasn't been given a PhD (a de facto minimum requirement for that job). UIUC is great, but in a tier below other schools, who presumably didn't admit him (or made him pay too much).

But saying he's "ranked in the top 1%" is very disingenuous to this conversation. The 99th percentile basketball doesn't make a college team. And I'm saying he belongs on the NBA All-Star team. And yes, it would be a "catastrophically bad" bad process if Anthony Davis couldn't have made a college team. But the difference between 99th percentile and 99.9999th percentile is enormous, and mistaking one for the other in any context is terrible.