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 and his work ethic, and that his teachers wanted to hear from him and challenge his beliefs. Mr. Sayed was among his favorite teachers, along with a science teacher, Mr. Maharaj, who passed away in 2018. The holistic approach to subject matter appealed to Vitalik, as did learning new and ancient languages. In 10th grade Vitalik was already burning through calculus – a subject most students didn't get to until senior year. And it wasn't just that he knew how to solve differential equations: Vitalik solved them in ways unlike anyone else.
“He had an algorithmic approach where the whole thing was step by step,” Mr. Sayed said. Whereas other students would arrive at the answer using the easiest way they could, Vitalik did it his way. “Whenever I used to mark his math tests, I'm not joking, his tests became my answer sheets because his answers were way more descriptive and in detail than the answers I had written.”
It wasn't just math; Vitalik excelled in all his subjects. Michelle Lefolii, one of the teachers who founded Abelard, taught Vitalik English. “He wrote a brilliant essay on formal experimentation in Moby Dick in grade 12 that I still use with my students to show them what a good grade 12 essay focused on literary analysis looks like,” she said.
Titled “The Nature and Purpose of Formal Experimentation in Moby Dick,” the essay, which was printed in the 2011–2012 Abelard literary journal, could easily be from the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. He began it this way: “Reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick, it becomes clear that it is not merely a novel; it is sometimes a novel, sometimes a play, sometimes a sermon, sometimes a textbook, and sometimes a true encyclopedia, encircling the subject of whaling from every side, whether scientific, technical, historical, or cultural.” (He knew about encyclopedias by then, didn't he?)
The ability that would propel him into the limelight once he found the Bitcoin world was becoming clear at Abelard: he was a damn good writer.
“His writing always stood out because it was remarkably logical and always beautifully structured, but at the same time not academically stiff,” Ms. Lefolii said. With the support of Abelard and the students around him, Vitalik began to grow into himself. “He also just had a lot of fun, in everything, in his class discussions, in his writing,” she said. “He always had a great sense of humor.”
He wrote short stories too, one of which – “On Christmas Presents and Friendship” – was published in the school's literary journal. In it four friends are exchanging Christmas gifts in a sort of secret Santa fashion. There are echoes of Vitalik's personality throughout the story, such as when his character Ulrich disdains the pursuit of materialism: “How could such trivial things arouse such euphoric happiness, when there was so much more to life than mindless