One of the benefits of being at a university like Stanford is that we occasionally get the opportunity to see up close the emergence of an amazing mathematical talent—someone who may turn out to be the next Euler or Gauss.
Just over 18 months ago, Avril Wan was, to all
appearances, just another bright fourteen-year-old living in Taiwan, where her
father Yewful Wan runs a large shipping company and her Welsh-born mother
Melanie Wan is a university mathematics professor (and a former student of Timothy Gowers in Cambridge).
Then, in September 2011, Stanford computer science professor
Sebastian Thrun and Google researcher Peter Norvig offered what turned out to
be the first of what is now a flood of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs),
which make advanced university courses available to the entire world over the
Internet. Ms. Wan enrolled for that first MOOC, in artificial intelligence, and was the only student
to score a perfect 100% for the course.
When initial investigations made it clear that Ms. Wan’s
performance was legitimate, Thrun moved quickly, and arranged for Stanford to
offer her a place in Stanford’s famed Symbolic
Systems Program (which has produced a whole string of graduates who have
founded and led successful Silicon Valley companies, such as Reid Hoffman, who
founded LinkedIn, and Marissa Meyer, an early employee of Google and the new—and controversial—CEO of Yahoo!).
By the time Wan arrived at Stanford, Thrun had left to form Udacity, a Silicon Valley start-up offering
free online courses to the world, and the newly arrived student, who had just
turned 15 (and was accompanied by her mother), was assigned to the educational
care of another famous Stanford mathematics professor, Persi Diaconis, known
for his ability to see familiar problems in novel ways.
In late spring of 2012, there was a buzz across the Palo
Alto campus when it seemed that, under minimal guidance from Diaconis, the
young Ms. Wan had solved the notorious P = NP problem, but
Ron Graham of the University
of California at San Diego quickly found an error, pointing out that she had
implicitly assumed the existence of a complete, two-valued measure on the power
set of the natural numbers—a question first raised by the famous (Second
World) Wartime mathematician Stan Ulam.
Meanwhile, Ms. Wan’s mathematics blog had started to attract
attention back in her home country, making her somewhat of a Taiwan celebrity.
In particular, motivational videos she had posted on YouTube to encourage young
Taiwanese girls to study mathematics, eventually came to the attention of News
Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, who pledged $5M to make her videos available
throughout the developing world.
But then, online tech journalist Dan Gillmor posted an article pointing out
that Murdoch’s funding was contingent on the distribution being restricted to
streaming to tablets supplied by his own, for-profit company Amplify. If so, that would surely have
killed the deal, since Ms. Wan recognizes the value of free educational
resources to the development of the less affluent countries of the world.
At that point, events started to unfold at the kind of
breakneck speed that only happens in Silicon Valley. Ms. Wan, still just 15 years old, remember, and technically without even a high school diploma, found herself inside the Palo Alto offices of the famed venture capital
company Greylock Partners, which was
willing to commit $100M to fund the establishment of a global, free, online
mathematics education platform, tentatively called “Wan World.”
With Greylock having been early stage funders of some of the
most successful start-up companies in recent years, most of which required
several years before anyone had the faintest idea how they would make money,
that interest was all it took to unleash the floodgates. Within a few days, Ms. Wan (or rather, the group of advisers her father quickly assembled to cope with
the interest) had been approached by Apple, Google, and Facebook, each of which
wanted to develop the platform on which Wan World would run, and by McGraw
Hill, Pearson Education, and Amazon, who wanted to own the content.
Meanwhile, despite all this frenzy, Ms. Wan herself seems
remarkably unfazed by the sudden changes in her life. Speaking to an unusually
full room in a recent meeting of Stanford’s Education’s
Digital Future lecture/discussion series (which is where I first met her),
she concluded her presentation by admitting to her fellow students, “Like you,
right now, I just want to graduate.”
