The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2 “AFTER PROTRACTED NEGOTIATIONS, IT WAS AGREED THAT ROBERT WOULD BE PUT ON PROBATION.”

1.

Chris Langan's mother was from San Francisco and was estranged from her family. She had four sons, each with a different father. Chris was the eldest. His father disappeared before Chris was born; he was said to have died in Mexico. His mother's second husband was murdered. Her third committed suicide. Her fourth was a failed journalist named Jack Langan.

“To this day I haven't met anybody who was as poor when they were kids as our family was,” Chris Langan says. “We didn't have a pair of matched socks. Our shoes had holes in them. Our pants had holes in them. We only had one set of clothes. I remember my brothers and I going into the bathroom and using the bathtub to wash our only set of clothes and we were bare-assed naked when we were doing that because we didn't have anything to wear.”

Jack Langan would go on drinking sprees and disappear.

He would lock the kitchen cabinets so the boys couldn't get to the food. He used a bullwhip to keep the boys in line. He would get jobs and then lose them, moving the family on to the next town. One summer the family lived on an Indian reservation in a teepee, subsisting on governmentsurplus peanut butter and cornmeal. For a time, they lived in Virginia City, Nevada. “There was only one law officer in town, and when the Hell's Angels came to town, he would crouch down in the back of his office,” Mark Langan remembers. “There was a bar there, I'll always remember. It was called the Bucket of Blood Saloon.”

When the boys were in grade school, the family moved to Bozeman, Montana. One of Chris's brothers spent time in a foster home. A nother was sent to reform school.

“I don't think the school ever understood just how gifted Christopher was,” his brother Jeff says. “He sure as hell didn't play it up. This was Bozeman. It wasn't like it is today. It was a small hick town when we were growing up. We weren't treated well there. They'd just decided that my family was a bunch of deadbeats.” T o stick up for himself and his brothers, Chris started to lift weights. One day, when Chris was fourteen, Jack Langan got rough with the boys, as he sometimes did, and Chris knocked him out cold. Jack left, never to return. Upon graduation from high school, Chris was offered two full scholarships, one to Reed College in Oregon and the other to the University of Chicago. He chose Reed.

“It was a huge mistake,” Chris recalls. “I had a real case of culture shock. I was a crew-cut kid who had been working as a ranch hand in the summers in Montana, and there I was, with a whole bunch of long-haired city kids, most of them from New York. And these kids had a whole different style than I was used to. I couldn't get a word in edgewise at class. They were very inquisitive. Asking questions all the time. I was crammed into a dorm room. There were four of us, and the other three guys had a whole different other lifestyle. They were smoking pot. They would bring their girlfriends into the room. I had never smoked pot before. So basically I took to hiding in the library.”

He continued: “Then I lost that scholarship My mother was supposed to fill out a parents' financial statement for the renewal of that scholarship. She neglected to do so. She was confused by the requirements or whatever. At some point, it came to my attention that my scholarship had not been renewed. So I went to the office to ask why, and they told me, Well, no one sent us the financial statement, and we allocated all the scholarship money and it's all gone, so I'm afraid that you don't have a scholarship here anymore. That was the style of the place. They simply didn't care. They didn't give a shit about their students. There was no counseling, no mentoring, nothing.”

Chris left Reed before the final set of exams, leaving him with a row of Fs on his transcript. In the first semester, he had earned As. He went back to Bozeman and worked in construction and as a forest services firefighter for a year and a half. Then he enrolled at Montana State University.

“I was taking math and philosophy classes,” he recalled. “And then in the winter quarter, I was living thirteen miles out of town, out on Beach Hill Road, and the transmission fell out of my car. My brothers had used it when I was gone that summer. They were working for the railroad and had driven it on the railroad tracks. I didn't have the money to repair it. So I went to my adviser and the dean in sequence and said, I have a problem. The transmission fell out of my car, and you have me in a seven-thirty a.m. and eight-thirty a.m. class. If you could please just transfer me to the afternoon sections of these classes, I would appreciate it because of this car problem. There was a neighbor who was a rancher who was going to take me in at eleven o'clock. My adviser was this cowboy-looking guy with a handlebar mustache, dressed in a tweed jacket. He said, 'Well, son, after looking at your transcript at Reed College, I see that you have yet to learn that everyone has to make sacrifices to get an education. Request denied.' So then I went to the dean. Same treatment.”

His voice grew tight. He was describing things that had happened more than thirty years ago, but the memory still made him angry. “At that point I realized, here I was, knocking myself out to make the money to make my way back to school, and it's the middle of the Montana winter. I am willing to hitchhike into town every day, do whatever I had to do, just to get into school and back, and they are unwilling to do anything for me. So bananas. And that was the point I decided I could do without the higher-education system. Even if I couldn't do without it, it was sufficiently repugnant to me that I wouldn't do it anymore. So I dropped out of college, simple as that.”

Chris Langan's experiences at Reed and Montana State represented a turning point in his life. As a child, he had dreamt of becoming an academic. He should have gotten a PhD; universities are institutions structured, in large part,

for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity. “Once he got into the university environment, I thought he would prosper, I really did/' his brother Mark says. ”I thought he would somehow find a niche. It made absolutely no sense to me when he left that."

Without a degree, Langan floundered. He worked in construction. One frigid winter he worked on a clam boat on Long Island. He took factory jobs and minor civil service positions and eventually became a bouncer in a bar on Long Island, which was his principal occupation for much of his adult years. Through it all, he continued to read deeply in philosophy, mathematics, and physics as he worked on a sprawling treatise he calls the “ C T M U ” t h e “Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe.” But without academic credentials, he despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal.

“I am a guy who has a year and a half of college,” he says, with a shrug. “And at some point this will come to the attention of the editor, as he is going to take the paper and send it off to the referees, and these referees are going to try and look me up, and they are not going to find me. And they are going to say, This guy has a year and a half of college. How can he know what he's talking about?”

It is a heartbreaking story. At one point I asked Langan hypotheticallywhether he would take a job at Harvard University were it offered to him. “Well, that's a difficult question,” he replied. "Obviously, as a full professor at Harvard I would count. My ideas would have weight and I could use my position, my affiliation at Harvard, to promote my ideas. A n institution like that is a great source of intellectual energy, and if I were at a place like that, I could absorb the vibration in the air.“ It was suddenly clear how lonely his life has been. Here he was, a man with an insatiable appetite for learning, forced for most of his adult life to live in intellectual isolation. ”I even noticed that kind of intellectual energy in the year and a half I was in college,“ he said, almost wistfully. ”Ideas are in the air constantly. It's such a stimulating place to be.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “Harvard is basically a glorified corporation, operating with a profit incentive. That's what makes it tick. It has an endowment in the billions of dollars. The people running it are not necessarily searching for truth and knowledge. They want to be big shots, and when you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck. When you're there, they got a thumb right on you. They are out to make sure you don't step out of line.”

2.

What does the story of Chris Langan tell usHis explanations, as heartbreaking as they are, are also a little strange. His mother forgets to sign his financial aid form andjust like thatno scholarship. He tries to move from a morning to an afternoon class, something students do every day, and gets stopped cold. And why were Langan's teachers at Reed and Montana State so indifferent to his plightTeachers typically delight in minds as brilliant as his. Langan talks about dealing with Reed and Montana State as if they were some kind of vast and unyielding govern ment bureaucracy. But colleges, particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed, tend not to be rigid bureaucracies. Making allowances in the name of helping someone stay in school is what professors do all the time.

Even in his discussion of Harvard, it's as if Langan has no conception of the culture and particulars of the institution he's talking about. When you accept a paycheck from these people, it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck. WhatOne of the main reasons college professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in private industry is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right. Langan has Harvard backwards.

When Langan told me his life story, I couldn't help thinking of the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who famously headed the American effort to develop the nuclear bomb during World War II. Oppenheimer, by all accounts, was a child with a mind very much like Chris Langan's. His parents considered him a genius. One of his teachers recalled that “he received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” He was doing lab experiments by the third grade and studying physics and chemistry by the fifth grade. When he was nine, he once told one of his cousins, “Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.”

Oppenheimer went to Harvard and then on to Cambridge University to pursue a doctorate in physics. There, Oppenheimer, who struggled with depression his entire life, grew despondent. His gift was for theoretical physics, and his tutor, a man named Patrick Blackett (who would win a Nobel Prize in 1948), was forcing him to attend to the minutiae of experimental physics, which he hated. He grew more and more emotionally unstable, and then, in an act so strange that to this day no one has properly made sense of it, Oppenheimer took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor.

Blackett, luckily, found out that something was amiss. The university was informed. Oppenheimer was called on the carpet. And what happened next is every bit as unbe lievable as the crime itself. Here is how the incident is described in American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's biography of Oppenheimer: “After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London.”

On probation?

Here we have two very brilliant young students, each of whom runs into a problem that imperils his college career. Langan s mother has missed a deadline for his financial aid. Oppenheimer has tried to poison his tutor. To continue on, they are required to plead their cases to authority. And what happensLangan gets his scholarship taken away, and Oppenheimer gets sent to a psychiatrist. Oppenheimer and Langan might both be geniuses, but in other ways, they could not be more different.

The story of Oppenheimer's appointment to be scientific director of the Manhattan Project twenty years later is perhaps an even better example of this difference. The gen eral in charge of the Manhattan Project was Leslie Groves, and he scoured the country, trying to find the right person to lead the atomic-bomb effort. Oppenheimer, by rights,

was a long shot. He was just thirty-eight, and junior to many of the people whom he would have to manage. He was a theorist, and this was a job that called for experimenters and engineers. His political affiliations were dodgy: he had all kinds of friends who were Communists. Perhaps more striking, he had never had any administrative experience. “He was a very impractical fellow,” one of Oppenheimer's friends later said. “He walked about with scuffed shoes and a funny hat, and, more important, he didn't know anything about equipment.” As one Berkeley scientist put it, more succinctly: “He couldn't run a hamburger stand.”

Oh, and by the way, in graduate school he tried to kill his tutor. This was the resume of the man who was trying out for what might be said to bewithout exaggeration one of the most important jobs of the twentieth century. And what happened The same thing that happened twenty years earlier at Cambridge: he got the rest of the world to see things his way.

Here are Bird and Sherwin again: “Oppenheimer understood that Groves guarded the entrance to the Manhattan Project, and he therefore turned on all his charm and bril liance. It was an irresistible performance.” Groves was smitten. “'He's a genius,' Groves later told a reporter. 'A real genius.' ” Groves was an engineer by training with a graduate degree from MIT, and Oppenheimer's great insight was to appeal to that side of Groves. Bird and Sherwin go on: "Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour [of potential candidates] who grasped that building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems [Groves]

found himself nodding in agreement when Oppenheimer pitched the notion of a central laboratory devoted to this purpose, where, as he later testified, 'we could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering and ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration/ "

Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at ReedW ould he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoonOf course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

“They required that everyone take introductory calculus,” Langan said of his brief stay at Montana State. “And I happened to get a guy who taught it in a very dry, very trivial way. I didn't understand why he was teaching it this way. So I asked him questions. I actually had to chase him down to his office. I asked him, 'Why are you teaching this way Why do you consider this practice to be relevant to calculus?' A nd this guy, this tall, lanky guy, always had sweat stains under his arms, he turned and looked at me and said, 'Y ou know, there is something you should probably get straight. Some people just don't have the intellectual firepower to be mathematicians.' ”

There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what the prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In factand this is the most heartbreaking part of allhe manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor.

The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.

3.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psy chologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence.,, To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like ”knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.“ It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It's practical in nature: that is, it's not knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are ”orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other. You can have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence, oras in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimeryou can have lots of both.

So where does something like practical intelligence come fromWe know where analytical intelligence comes from. It's something, at least in part, that's in your genes. Chris Langan started talking at six months. He taught ioI himself to read at three years of age. He was born smart. IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.* But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.

Perhaps the best explanation we have of this process comes from the sociologist Annette Lareau, who a few years ago conducted a fascinating study of a group of third graders. She picked both blacks and whites and children from both wealthy homes and poor homes, zeroing in, ultimately, on twelve families. Lareau and her team visited each family at least twenty times, for hours at a stretch. She and her assistants told their subjects to treat them like “the family dog,” and they followed them to church and to soccer games and to doctor's appointments, with a tape recorder in one hand and a notebook in the other.

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way.

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to * Most estimates put the heritability of IQ at roughly 50 percent.

the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn't soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class familyKatie Brindlesang in a choir after school.But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes:

What Mrs. Brindle doesn't do that is routine for middleclass mothers is view her daughter's interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie's interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter's talent. Instead she frames Katie's skills and interests as character traitssinging and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.”

The middle-class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn't just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority. If their children were doing poorly at school, the wealthier parents challenged their teachers. They intervened on behalf of their kids. One child Lareau follows just misses qualifying for a gifted program. Her mother arranges for her to be retested privately, petitions the school, and gets her daughter admitted. The poor parents, by contrast, are intimidated by authority. They react passively and stay in the background. Lareau writes of one low-income parent:

At a parent-teacher conference, for example, Ms. McAllister (who is a high school graduate) seems subdued. The gregarious and outgoing nature she displays at home is hidden in this setting. She sits hunched over in the chair and she keeps her jacket zipped up. She is very quiet. When the teacher reports that Harold has not been turning in his homework, Ms. McAllister clearly is flabbergasted, but all she says is, “He did it at home.” She does not follow up with the teacher or attempt to intervene on Harold's behalf. In her view, it is up to the teachers to manage her son's education. That is their job, not hers.

Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation.” It's an attempt to actively “foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills.” Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth.” They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own.

Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middleclass child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau's words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.”

That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: “They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences.” They knew the rules. “Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.”

By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.” They didn't know how to get their way, or how to “customize”using Lareau's wonderful termwhatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.

In one telling scene, Lareau describes a visit to the doctor by Alex Williams, a nine-year-old boy, and his mother, Christina. The Williamses are wealthy professionals.

“Alex, you should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor,” Christina says in the car on the way to the doctor's office. “You can ask him anything you want. Don't be shy. You can ask anything.”

Alex thinks for a minute, then says, “I have some bumps under my arms from my deodorant.” Christina: “ReallyYou mean from your new deodorant?” Alex: “Yes.” Christina: “Well, you should ask the doctor.”

Alex's mother, Lareau writes, “is teaching that he has the right to speak up”that even though he's going to be in a room with an older person and authority figure, it's perfectly all right for him to assert himself. They meet the doctor, a genial man in his early forties. He tells Alex that he is in the ninety-fifth percentile in height. Alex then interrupts:

ALEX: I'm in the what

DOCTOR: It means that you're taller than more than ninety-five out of a hundred young men when they're,

uh, ten years old. ALEX: I'm not ten.

DOCTOR: W ell, they graphed you at ten. Y ou'renine years and ten months. Theythey usually take the closest year to that graph.

Look at how easily Alex interrupts the doctor“I'm not ten.” That's entitlement: his mother permits that casual incivility because she wants him to learn to assert himself with people in positions of authority.

THE DOCTOR TURNS TO ALEX: Well, now the most important question. Do you have any questions you want to ask me before I do your physical?

ALEX: Um...only one. I've been getting some bumps on my arms, right around here (indicates underarm).

DOCTOR: Underneath

ALEX: Yeah.

DOCTOR: Okay. I'll have to take a look at those when I come in closer to do the checkup. And I'll see what they are and what I can do. Do they hurt or itch

ALEX: No, they're just there.

DOCTOR: Okay, I'll take a look at those bumps for you.

This kind of interaction simply doesn't happen with lower-class children, Lareau says. They would be quiet and submissive, with eyes turned away. Alex takes charge of the moment. “In remembering to raise the question he prepared in advance, he gains the doctor's full attention and focuses it on an issue of his choosing,” Lareau writes.

In so doing, he successfully shifts the balance of power away from the adults and toward himself. The transition goes smoothly. Alex is used to being treated with respect. He is seen as special and as a person worthy of adult attention and interest. These are key characteristics of the strategy of concerted cultivation. Alex is not showing off during his checkup. He is behaving much as he does with his parentshe reasons, negotiates, and jokes with equal ease.

It is important to understand where the particular mastery of that moment comes from. It's not genetic. Alex Williams didn't inherit the skills to interact with authority figures from his parents and grandparents the way he inherited the color of his eyes. Nor is it racial: it's not a practice specifie to either black or white people. As it turns out, Alex Williams is black and Katie Brindle is white. It's a cultural advantage. Alex has those skills because over the course of his young life, his mother and fatherin the manner of educated familieshave painstakingly taught them to him, nudging and prodding and encouraging and showing him the rules of the game, right down to that lit tle rehearsal in the car on the way to the doctor's office.

When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also becauseand perhaps this is even more criticalthe sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.

4.

This is the advantage that Oppenheimer had and that Chris Langan lacked. Oppenheimer was raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, the son of an artist and a successful garment manufacturer. His childhood was the embodiment of concerted cultivation. O n weekends, the Oppenheimers would go driving in the countryside in a chauffeur-driven Packard. Summers he would be taken to Europe to see his grandfather. He attended the Ethical Culture School on Central Park West, perhaps the most progressive school in the nation, where, his biographers write, students were “infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world.” When his math teacher realized he was bored, she sent him off to do independent work.

As a child, Oppenheimer was passionate about rock collecting. At the age of twelve, he began corresponding with local geologists about rock formations he had seen in Central Park, and he so impressed them that they invited him to give a lecture before the New York Mineralogical Club. As Sherwin and Bird write, Oppenheimer's parents responded to their son's hobby in an almost textbook example of concerted cultivation:

Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as J. Robert Oppenheimer. The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium: a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause.

Is it any wonder Oppenheimer handled the challenges of his life so brilliantlyIf you are someone whose father has made his way up in the business world, then you've seen, firsthand, what it means to negotiate your way out of a tight spot. If you're someone who was sent to the Ethical Culture School, then you aren't going to be intimidated by a row of Cambridge dons arrayed in judgment against you. If you studied physics at Harvard, then you know how to talk to an army general who did engineering just down the road atMIT.

Chris Langan, by contrast, had only the bleakness of Bozeman, and a home dominated by an angry, drunken stepfather. “[Jack] Langan did this to all of us,” said Mark. “We all have a true resentment of authority.” That was the lesson Langan learned from his childhood: distrust authority and be independent. He never had a parent teach him on the way to the doctor how to speak up for himself, or how to reason and negotiate with those in positions of authority. He didn't learn entitlement. He learned constraint. It may seem like a small thing, but it was a crippling handicap in navigating the world beyond Bozeman.

“I couldn't get any financial aid either,” Mark went on. “We just had zero knowledge, less than zero knowledge, of the process. How to apply. The forms. Checkbooks. It was not our environment.”

“If Christopher had been born into a wealthy family, if he was the son of a doctor who was well connected in some major market, I guarantee you he would have been one of those guys you read about, knocking back PhDs at seventeen,” his brother Jeff says. “It's the culture you find yourself in that determines that. The issue with Chris is that he was always too bored to actually sit there and listen to his teachers. If someone had recognized his intelligence and if he was from a family where there was some kind of value on education, they would have made sure he wasn't bored.”

5.

When the Termites were into their adulthood, Terman looked at the records of 730 of the men and divided them into three groups. One hundred and fiftythe top 20 percentfell into what Terman called the A group. They were the true success stories, the starsthe lawyers and physicians and engineers and academics. Ninety percent of the As graduated from college and among them had earned 98 graduate degrees. The middle 60 percent were the B group, those who were doing “satisfactorily.” The bottom 150 were the Cs, the ones who Terman judged to have done the least with their superior mental ability. They were the postal workers and the struggling bookkeepers and the men lying on their couches at home without any job at all.

One third of the Cs were college dropouts. A quarter only had a high school diploma, and all 150 of the Cs each one of whom, at one point in his life, had been dubbed a geniushad together earned a grand total of eight graduate degrees.

What was the difference between the As and the CsTerman ran through every conceivable explanation. He looked at their physical and mental health, their “mas culinity-femininity scores,” and their hobbies and vocational interests. He compared the ages when they started walking and talking and what their precise IQ scores were in elementary and high school. In the end, only one thing mattered: family background.

The As overwhelmingly came from the middle and the upper class. Their homes were filled with books. Half the fathers of the A group had a college degree or beyond, and this at a time when a university education was a rarity. The Cs, on the other hand, were from the other side of the tracks. Almost a third of them had a parent who had dropped out of school before the eighth grade.

At one point, Terman had his fleldworkers go and visit everyone from the A and C groups and rate their personalities and manner. What they found is everything you would expect to find if you were comparing children raised in an atmosphere of concerted cultivation with children raised in an atmosphere of natural growth. The As were judged to be much more alert, poised, attractive, and well dressed. In fact, the scores on those four dimensions are so different as to make you think you are looking at two different species of humans. You aren't, of course. You're simply seeing the difference between those schooled by their families to present their best face to the world, and those denied that experience.

The Terman results are deeply distressing. Let's not forget how highly gifted the C group was. If you had met them at five or six years of age, you would have been overwhelmed by their curiosity and mental agility and sparkle. They were true outliers. The plain truth of the Terman study, however, is that in the end almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves.

What did the Cs lack, thoughNot something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in D N A or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. The Cs were squandered talent. But they didn't need to be.

6.

Today, Chris Langan lives in rural Missouri on a horse farm. He moved there a few years ago, after he got married. He is in his fifties but looks many years younger. He has the build of a linebacker, thick through the chest, with enormous biceps. His hair is combed straight back from his forehead. He has a neat, graying moustache and aviator-style glasses. If you look into his eyes, you can see the intelligence burning behind them.

“A typical day is, I get up and make coffee. I go in and sit in front of the computer and begin working on whatever I was working on the night before,” he told me not long ago. “I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamt the answer and I can remember it. Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.”

He had just been reading the work of the linguist Noam Chomsky. There were piles of books in his study. He ordered books from the library all the time. “I always feel that the closer you get to the original sources, the better off you are,” he said.

Langan seemed content. He had farm animals to take care of, and books to read, and a wife he loved. It was a much better life than being a bouncer.

“I don't think there is anyone smarter than me out there,” he went on. “I have never met anybody like me or never seen even an indication that there is somebody who actually has better powers of comprehension. Never seen it and I don't think I am going to. I couldmy mind is open to the possibility. If anyone should challenge me'Oh, I think that I am smarter than you are' I think I could have them.”

What he said sounded boastful, but it wasn't really. It was the oppositea touch defensive. He'd been working for decades now on a project of enormous sophisticationbut almost none of what he had done had ever been published much less read by the physicists and philosophers and mathematicians who might be able to judge its value. Here he was, a man with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world. He wasn't holding forth at academic conferences. He wasn't leading a graduate seminar at some prestigious university. He was living on a slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Mis souri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cutoff Tshirt. He knew how it looked: it was the great paradox of Chris Langan's genius.

“I have not pursued mainstream publishers as hard as I should have,” he conceded. “Going around, querying publishers, trying to find an agent. I haven't done it, and I am not interested in doing it.”

It was an admission of defeat. Every experience he had had outside of his own mind had ended in frustration. He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his calculus teacher, for goodness' sake. These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no onenot rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses ever makes it alone.