Teenager solves stubborn riddle about prime number look-alikes
I knew a guy in high school that carried around a sub-compact notebook and one day in science class we were learning about how to factor quadratic equations (a review of old math we should know) and this guy was not paying attention at all, just typing away. The teacher asked him what he was doing that was so important that he couldn't listen, and to please come up and solve the problem.<p>This kid walked straight up to the board and explained how you can design a computer program to factor any polynomial equation string input to it, and in fact had implemented a polynomial equation factoring program while the teacher explained how to factor simple quadratic equations.<p>Since then, I don't feel bad if someone achieves more than me, because clearly there are some people out there that are <i>born</i> to solve certain classes of problems (maybe their brain structure is better for those, or something, who knows).