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Is this the youngest professor ever?

Sabur.jpg

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, and what appears to be most major media outlets, Alia Sabur (pictured above) has broken the record for the world’s youngest professor.

Sabur, 19, will begin teaching physics next month at the Department of Advanced Technology Fusion at Konkuk University, Korea. It will be just another entry on the teenager’s laden CV, which reveals she received a bachelor’s degree at 14 and a masters in materials science at 17.

Something might be awry here, though. There’s nothing wrong with the media adopting the American English definition of “professor” (i.e. any university teacher) — after all, Sabur was born in New York. But it appears that the previous record holder was Scottish physicist Colin Maclaurin, who was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen when he was a few months over 19 in 1717.

I might have to explain to our international readers that in the UK “professor” is a more distinguished title, reserved for heads-of-departments and the like. (At least it has been as far back as any of us at Physics World can vouch for.) Sabur, I note, is yet to defend her PhD.

Does this mean the titles of Sabur and Maclaurin are being confused? Does Maclaurin, who is credited with the mathematical “Maclaurin series”, deserve to keep his accolade?

Of course, science was a considerably narrower discipline back in the 18th century, and achieving a professorship might have taken a little less time than it does today (it certainly wouldn’t have required a PhD). But Maclaurin can’t defend his honour, and offhand I don’t know enough about science in the early 1700s to cast a vote either way.

Do any of you have any thoughts? Feel free to comment below.

 

Posted by Jon Cartwright on May 2, 2008 4:33 PM |

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Comments (4)

  • 1 Jonathan Vos Post May 3, 2008 8:19 PM

    I was a ripe old 16 when I moved to Pasadena to attend Caltech. This great university has had some much younger students, some of whom had professional publications by age 12.

    California State University Los Angeles has a program called EEP (Early Entrance Program) that recruits child prodigies, assesses in a summer quarter if they have the emotional and social maturity to be fully matriculated university students.

    My son passed the entrance exams at 12, started regular classes at 13, and received his double B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science at age 18. He is now at USC Law School, specializing in Intellectual Property. EEP has had younger students, including a young lady who started at age 10. Some alumni have gone on to remarkable careers, but, off the top of my head, I do not know the youngest "professor" by either definition.

  • 2 A Thyagaraja May 9, 2008 8:33 AM

    This needs checking, but I thought the great French mathematician, Joseph Louis Lagrange was appointed Professor at University of Turin at 16 or 17. Norbert Wiener is another "possible" prodigy professor-again, I am not sure.

  • 3 Francesco Piazza May 9, 2008 6:47 PM

    Miss Sabur might be the youngest professor ever. The point is: what is the point? The after-taste is that of a young teenager deprived of the natural time-scales of life apprenticeship. It might take a flash to learn, but it takes time to savour. Why on earth should one want to get a master at 16? At 16 you want to chase girls and all the rest, and this will teach you much more than loosing your sight precociously on university books. I suggest the parents of these poor guys to have their kids read Kundera's thought in his short novel "Slowness". Actually, is there any time left for getting interested and learn from the past when you are in fact just skimming life? The present society desperately needs more time, just more time. For relaxing, for sleeping, for burping nonsenses over cans of beers with friends, for musing over the real big problems. More time to learn back from the past, when time was still important. Just relax, guys.

  • 4 Andrei Kirilyuk May 10, 2008 1:30 PM

    Very good, Francesco, well expressed and exact. We do need to become both "deeper" in knowledge and "warmer" in related "human" and "social" aspects, instead of enforcing ever more that spirit-killing modern tendency of "technical supermen" (or supergirl!). Whereas in this case her nice (Turkish?) smile gives a reasonable hope for survival, this industrial civilisation has succeeded to impose its grotesque methods in science, where they produce yet much greater devastation than in the natural environment (maybe because intelligence is also something "natural", at least it used to be...). Examples cited by A Thyagaraja imply that in previous epochs there were, apparently, some "encouraging" cases of big and early scientific success, but probably the purpose and character of knowledge we deal with today are dramatically different from those times. Today it's not enough to invent or be particularly skilful with an "interesting" technical (e.g. mathematical) tool: we have already so many of them but our progress with their application to truly complex phenomena of today's interest seems to stagnate almost in proportion to those tools perfection... It's time to return to the unreduced complexity of nature and its honest, explicitly efficient understanding. So it's better to relax, indeed, because the true problems we have can easily exceed even the most experienced imagination... And I would add, there is a flavour of subjective "personal relations" role in the described story. Is there a difference between (real) knowledge "prodigy" and (subjectively promoted) "parvenu" today?

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