Out of the Ether. Matthew Leising

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СКАЧАТЬ their eyes in amazement.”

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As winter turned to spring in 2000, Vitalik now had two new additions to his life to deal with: his new home in the unfamiliar and sprawling city of Toronto, and Maia, his dad's girlfriend. He moved into their apartment and slowly began acclimating to both.

      Maia and Dmitry had met while working together at Arthur Andersen. “It was August 7, 1995,” Maia said. “I have a weird memory for dates.” They moved in together in 1998 after Dmitry separated from Natalia and the talk soon turned to leaving Russia. Maia's mother had emigrated to Canada in 1991 with her 13-year-old brother and she'd been to Montreal and Ottawa many times. When Natalia moved to Edmonton to attend school, all the pieces were in place. Maia had founded Columbus along with Dmitry: all they had to do now was sell the business.

      Yet Canada was very different from Russia, and Maia had a precocious six-year-old in her life now. She had to find ways to win him over. She found it fun to introduce him to all sorts of new things, like hamburgers. Vitalik had never had a hamburger in Kolomna. They had a game where they would wrestle and after Vitalik beat her a few times, he said, “You are like a conquered moose.” Her nickname was born. From then on, Vitalik called Maia losik, which roughly translates from Russian as “little moose.”

      His creativity and playfulness with language was starting to emerge. When they visited friends in Rochester, Vitalik was given a stuffed dog. He named it Rastopyry, which doesn't translate exactly from the Russian but was understood by Maia and Dmitry to mean that the dog's legs were spread. “It was a completely made-up name, but in our family we still use a lot of words that Vitalik created,” Maia said. “Vitalik is quirky and very unusual and bright and totally creative.”

      Vitalik's favorite stuffed animal at the time was a rabbit he'd brought with him from Russia. He'd fallen in love with the creatures and by the time he was seven he'd written a 17-page document called “The Encyclopedia of Bunnies.” It contained jokes and pictures drawn in Excel and scientific assessments, such as a periodic table of various bunny qualities.

      From the section titled “Bunnies speed”:

       On Oct. 19, 2001, 6:07 p.m., the bunnies run 3745.284 million km/sec. Probably on New Year 2002, they will run 0.77 light-years per second.

Two graphs measure the speed progression. If you are wondering, from the section titled “First time bunnies will be seen,” the answer is:

       Never! By the year 4000, they will run 1048576.59053 light-years per second.

      Another section details “Bunnies computers” and answers such questions as “What number system do bunnies computers use?” and “What programs are there?” Then there is this exploration of gender differences in his favorite subject:

       How many man and women bunnies are there?

       There are: 8 men.

       There is only 1 woman.

       That is the cat.

      Dmitry joked that this was Vitalik's first white paper. “The Encyclopedia of Bunnies” convinced him that his son wasn't just bright, he was off-the-charts smart.

      But one thing that never came easily to Vitalik was feeling confident around people outside his family. While still in Kolomna it had been challenging to keep him in daycare, which had worried Dima. He knew his son needed social acclimation. While Vitalik routinely aced his multiplication tests, making friends proved much trickier.

      “When people praised me for being some kind of unique math genius, that made me feel isolated,” Vitalik said. “I definitely wished I could be more like other people, in both the good and bad ways.” While he had people at school he considered friends, who he'd hang out with at recess and lunch, going beyond that sort of forced congeniality eluded him. “I knew that other people had friends where they would even hang out after school and do all those things, and I just never figured out how to get into that.”

His mom could see that he felt lonely and like an outsider in elementary school. She helped get him moved into a gifted class in third grade, but then worried that being with other really bright children – who may not have had their own social skills under control – wouldn't help Vitalik get the kind of peer interaction he needed. But she also knew there was a public Vitalik who struggled to make connections and a private Vitalik, the one who loved to draw, who wrote “The Encyclopedia of Bunnies,” and who made numbers out of his Legos because math was in his blood. On the computer, he began drawing using the Logo programming language. And it was here too that he first displayed an almost complete lack of interest in material things and possessions that has followed him throughout his life. “He never asked for anything to be purchased for him,” Natalia said. “When we'd go to the store, he was really indifferent to that stuff.” Buying gifts for him at Christmas and his birthday is difficult to this day because he always says he doesn't want anything.

      Yet soon even the gifted class became tedious for Vitalik, and he grew bored. His mom tried introducing piano lessons and tennis, but nothing really clicked. He did look forward to the weekly math classes he took from a local Russian professor. He loved the chance to stretch his brain, and continued with the classes through his senior year of high school.

      And then, middle school – Cummer Valley Middle School, to be precise. Like every other human being, Vitalik found himself lost in a confusing, pedantic circus. Canadian elementary schools feature a lot of playtime compared with class time, but that ratio changes in middle school and Vitalik was in for a hard and boring few years. His dad understood his son's innate affinity for computers from the beginning, so he resisted pushing programming on him. He let him find his own way for the most part, with a suggestion here or a nudge there. He bought Vitalik a book on the Allegro graphic programming language and enrolled him in weekend programming courses. Vitalik read extracurricular science books in his spare time. The truth was, though, that Dmitry and Maia and Natalia all knew Vitalik would end up drowning in the tepid sea of Toronto's public high school system. Even if he stood far above all the other 700 students at Cummer Valley, his vast potential would hardly be scratched.

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The Abelard School was founded in 1997 by a group of ambitious Toronto teachers who wanted to put already smart students to the test. There are 5 students per teacher, the class size doesn't go above 10, and by graduation Abelard students will have read Sophocles, Oscar Wilde, Zora Neale Hurston, Twain, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare, the Bible, T.S. Eliot, and many other literary luminaries. Latin is required in the first year; many students continue on with it through graduation. The Iliad is taught in Greek. The curriculum is integrated across subjects, with students encouraged to take from chemistry to add to Latin to mix with physics to complement English. The 50 kids who typically make up the student body aren't allowed to use laptops in class; they're encouraged to develop direct interactions with their peers rather than perfect their ability to google. Abelard was about as far away from Cummer Valley Middle School as one could get, and exactly what Natalia knew Vitalik needed.

      He entered Abelard in 2008 as a shy, quiet 14-year-old. He carried a book under his arm, either a programming language he was learning or an academic text, which he'd read at lunch. In the beginning, at least, he had no idea how this new school would change his life.

      “In the public school system you always focus on the bottom 10 percent, you never get to focus on the top 1 percent,” said Asim Sayed, who taught Vitalik math, physics, chemistry, and calculus at Abelard. Kids like Vitalik “tend to get lost,” he said. Vitalik soon came to realize he was among peers who shared his love of learning СКАЧАТЬ