&gt; These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly.<p>We wish we had been but we didn&#x27;t live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad&#x27;s college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the time. Astronomy club. Chess club. In high school I went to night school with my friends&#x27; mom at the university in the big city when I wasn&#x27;t working to help pay the rent. You just couldn&#x27;t get the breadth and ease of access to information you can today. It was slow and laborious back then.<p>But a world like this? Today? Amazing. You don&#x27;t even have to leave your house. He is lucky. I&#x27;m 33 now and I&#x27;d kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day. It just wasn&#x27;t in the cards. Parents, circumstances, life and all of that.<p>Yes... we&#x27;ll envy stories like this. More of us could have been this hungry. We just couldn&#x27;t get there.