Instead of focusing on elementary school and indulging on activities typical children of his age enjoy, 9-year-old phenom William Maillis has taken academics head on.
Son of a Greek Orthodox priest, the boy graduated from high school with honours and is now developing his own theories of how the universe was created in college.
William has joined the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, to prepare and is planning to enroll at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh by next year.
“It doesn’t bother me” being the youngest student in class by far, William who aspires to study physics and chemistry of space told People magazine in an interview. “I’m used to it by now.”
“I want to prove to everybody that God does exist,” he stresses, by showing that only an outside force could be capable of forming the cosmos.
To do that, he studies intensively and focuses on concepts like “displacement of space-time” “singularity” and “pure gravity” insisting that black holes aren’t “super massive” as theorized by such other brilliant minds as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
His father Peter and mother Nancy had him after 17 years of marriage, while already parents of a 29-year-old daughter and 26-year-old-son.
“William was just very sharp,” the father tells People adding that the boy could accurately identify numbers at 6 months old and speak in complete sentences at just 7 months of age. “William remembers everything he sees.”
He followed with a range of impressive academic feats, including doing addition at 21 months; multiplication, reading and writing at 2 years old; algebra, sign language and reading Greek at age 4; geometry at 5 and trigonometry at 7. However, when William tried to enroll in kindergarten at age 4 he was turned down when he insisted “grey is a shade, not a color” and failed to identify an old thermometer.
By finishing third grade William chose to simultaneously attend fourth grade and high school while also taking some college classes.
Meanwhile, a college psychologist declared him a “pure genius” after administering IQ tests asWilliam doesn’t take notes like the other students, but simply listens, reads and absorbs the material.
“The boy fits right in with his other college students,” William’s history professor, Aaron Hoffman, says.
“We haven’t steered away from any topics: Hitler, Mussolini, the Holocaust, wars,” Hoffman says. “If he’s here for college, he’s going to get college-level material.”
The parents have decided to allow their son to make his own decisions in terms of subjects. “Whatever classes he wants to take, that’s okay with me. I don’t want to push him,” Mr Maillis continues.
“I just want him to appreciate the gift he has, which I think he does. I tell him, ‘God gave you a gift. The worst thing would be to reject that gift and not use it for the betterment of the world.’ “
