The 10 Youngest PhDs of All Time

Here is fair warning: this article may make you feel stupid. While you were a kid, learning about the mysteries of the screen door, prodigies at your age were solving differential equations and being nominated for Nobel Prizes. Invariably these geniuses skip elementary school altogether, teach themselves high school in a matter of months, and are off to college around the time they hit puberty. Some tire of academia and move on to other interests, but a few have proceeded to get doctoral degrees at incredibly early ages. Here are 10 of the youngest PhD recipients ever.

1. Kim Ung-Yong

   His world-record IQ of 210 makes him a genius nearly twice over. By age 3 (that’s not a typo) he was a physics student at university. NASA brought him from Korea to do research for them at age 8. He worked there for 10 years while earning a PhD in physics at the age of 16. When he left NASA and returned home, amazingly he could not find a job because he needed elementary, middle, and high school diplomas, all of which he had skipped and had to go back and earn.

2. Norbert Wiener

   
   This brilliant man died in 1964, but two prestigious awards, a math center at the University of Maryland, and a crater on the moon all bear his name. Norbert Wiener went to high school at 9, was out by 11, and by 14 had completed a college degree at Tufts. At the ripe age of 18, for his thesis on math logic, Harvard awarded Wiener a PhD. He would go on to work with guided missiles in World War II, acquiring knowledge that helped him create the field of cybernetics in 1948.

3. Sho Yano

   
   A 1500 SAT score is great, but every year dozens of students score higher. Only, Sho Yano earned his score when he was 8 years old. By that time he’d been reading for six years and composing music for four. At 9 he enrolled at Loyola University, and would graduate summa cum laude four years later and enter med school. Five years after that, when other kids might have celebrated an 18th birthday by buying cigarettes or emancipating themselves from their parents, Sho was reveling in his hard-earned PhD in molecular genetics and cell biology from the University of Chicago.

4. Sergey N. Mergelyan

   
   The Armenian man who gave us the theorem for finding holomorphic polynomials was clearly no dummy. After graduating from Yerevan State University at the age of 19, Mergelyan really picked up the pace, earning a doctor of science at age 20. To this day, no younger Russian has done the same. Four years later, he became the youngest ever member of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences. Mergelyan died in 2008 at the age of 80.

5. Akshay Venkatesh

   
   At the age of 12, Ashkay Venkatesh climbed the medal winners’ podium at the International Mathematics Olympiad and the bronze medal was placed around his neck. In 1997, at the age of 14, he was admitted to the University of Western Australia, becoming the school’s youngest student ever. He headed to the States to work on his PhD in number theory at Princeton University, finishing it in 2002 at just 20. He has since taught at MIT, NYU, and Stanford, lecturing on “equidistribution questions on homogeneous spaces, the interplay between ergodic and spectral techniques,” and other topics that are completely over our heads.
   
   
   
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