I loved numbers from a very young age. I feel like my mom led me there because, instead of giving me Game Boy and PlayStations and a TV, she gave me educational software on our family computer for Math and stuff.
The young child approaching a new subject or anew problem is like the scientist operating at the edge of his chosen field.
I taught myself to read music at a very young age, so when I started to take lessons in school, the teachers used to give me other instruments to keep me busy, because I was more advanced than the other kids.
I do remember, though, when I discovered the third! I was about five years old - it was a very pleasing sound. I remembered that if I hit one note, then skipped one and played the next, I could get this really good sound.
My mother started me on the piano when I was 3 years old.
When I was 12, that's when I went to college. All my friends were 20, 21, and I was 12. It didn't even occur to me that that was strange.
When I was six or seven, we went to the nearest English primary school, St Weonards, about seven miles away. The teaching was good, and this was the start of my beginning to shine as a student.
My mom says that she caught me one day in front of the TV watching opera. I was trying to sing back the opera. She saw that I really liked music, and so she put me in piano lessons when I was about three years old.
I was taught the alphabet by my aunts before I was four years old, and I was reading the Bible in class and beginning geography when I was six.
By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.
At the age of 12, I developed an intense interest in mathematics. On exposure to algebra, I was fascinated by simultaneous equations and read ahead of the class to the end of the book.
My mother recognized my artistic talent and looked for someone to teach me to grow my abilities. She found an artist on the street who sent his daughter, Umba, over to begin teaching me when I was only three years of age.
I think I got my education as a young boy from things I saw on TV.
I think for me I was in kindergarten, so I was very young and my teacher acknowledged that I was very dyslexic when it came to reading and writing and processing that information.
