36 Stories About Creepily Intelligent People

My great uncle was an in demand nuclear engineer in his working days, he’d be requested in multiple countries. Easy route? Hire a translator for trips. Did this man want to hire a translator? No, no he did not. The solution? Speaking 12 languages fluently.

During one of my advanced courses for my M.S. Machine Learning degree, this old Computer Science professor made borderline impossible worksheets. He was the stereotypical CS professor with a ponytail and glasses, and he believed the best way to teach was to give students time to try and solve complicated problems independently. His theory was that once he taught us how to solve them, we would appreciate the theory more since it made a problem that stumped us understandable.

Anyways, he would give us a worksheet with 4 to 6 questions and 4 hours to solve them in pairs. Most of the class could do one or two in the allocated time. The biggest outlier was this international student from Singapore who solved many of them each time. He wasn't even from our program - he was from the Mathematics department, taking the class for extra credit.

One day, I partnered with him to solve some graph problems, and we progressed well. We only got stuck on the last question, which was the type of question you had to read five times for it to make sense. It was on a completely different level than all the others. We started working on it and kept bouncing around ideas for about one hour.

Then, this guy has a brilliant insight and approaches the problem from a completely different branch of Mathematics. He solves it in just a few lines after that. We call the professor and show the solution to see if it's right. He looks at us wide-eyed like we're aliens.

It turns out he put an unsolved problem as the last question. It came up during one of his PhD students' research and stumped both. He put it in our worksheet just to see if someone could make some progress on it. My partner solved it in one hour flat. I was both impressed and thankful this guy was my partner lol.

My dad, who would be 102 this year, lived on a farm. The neighbor called my grandparents and said he heard that he had the best mechanic and could he borrow him. When my 13-year-old father showed up, the guy couldn’t believe it. My dad said, “Do you want your tractor fixed or not?” He fixed it, collected his payment, and left.

My husband is like this. He was fixing the electricity for his mom's renter at 14. He takes stuff apart and fixes it... Sometimes I want a new appliance, though. He didn't want to pay 15k for a new boiler install, so he decided he would learn about it and do it. It's perfect. He has done our plumbing, electric, building, makes me furniture, rigs cool lighting, surround sound, landscaping, fixes our cars, builds computers from scratch, puts networks together, and troubleshoots computers... There is only one thing that regularly stumps him... me! :).

There was a kid in my wife's 7th grade class that knew absolutely everything about spiders. He could identify any kind by seeing the spider or the web or even just a part of a leg or the corner of the face. Standard issue nerd.

But then I find out that the kid can call spiders out of hiding to come to his hand. He showed the trick to a bunch of friends outside at school, whispering to them and they jumped in his hand. He worked out some whispery sounds that different species liked, just from watching them outside. Imagine how much time that takes hanging out with spiders in your back yard.

I kind of wanted to know what his home life was like and kind of didn't.

I was a waitress from 1995 to 2015. I worked with a woman who never wrote down a single thing. Most impressive thing I saw her do: Take a party of 29, not write down one single word, and bring every person exactly what they ordered with zero mistakes. I still don't know how her brain could function like that!

I've got a number of them, but one in particular - my friend who was a car mechanic who couldn't do it anymore because his lungs were being negatively affected, too much exposure to exhaust. I've been in computers for decades, and figured if I used automotive terminology, I could describe some computer concepts so he could work in computers. My God, he picked it up so astonishingly fast that he started his own computer repair business. He was smarter than your average bear when it came to automotive things, too. He added a Corvette transmission to an old diesel pickup truck and could go way over the speed limit and get 50 mpg all day, too. He restored old cars and motorcycles and would frequently modify them to operate better than when new. A naturally brilliant guy all the way around and a great person to know. Crazy. Out of the box thinker too, which I like.

My grandma was one of those people that could play piano by ear. Never took lessons, didn’t play often, but she just “could”.

My niece taught herself to read at 3 while she was listening to her parents read to her. The family found out in an email she wrote to her grandmother.

I used to work in human services on a psych unit, and we had a repeat patient who, sadly, was VERY schizophrenic. Still, with a deck of cards, he could do all sorts of mind-blowing tricks, and he was a human calculator when it came to numbers. He couldn't articulate well enough to explain how he did it, but I still am curious to this day how he truly saw the world.

Last year when my niece was 4, my brother was having some issue with his heating system. My niece looked up a youtube video on what was going on, and was able to correctly diagnose the problem. It was definitely something an adult could've figured out as well, but it was just really surprising that she was able to figure it out on her own. She's a smart kiddo for sure.

The story reminds me of my son now, 10, but at the time of this story was 5, maybe 6. My ex-husband ( father of my children) had an older 80s model work van that had been giving him issues, wouldn't start, and if it did, it died shortly after, if I remember right. He'd been messing with it for a few weeks, and he was in the driveway yet again trying to diagnose the issue. My son and I are walking to my car, and my son stops to listen to the van my ex is trying to get started. As soon as we get in my car, my son says to me, "I'm pretty sure it's the fuel filter or carburetor." I can't remember which it was. So I tell my son, "Go tell your dad." He tells dad, dad says nah, buddy, that ain't it, but I'll check it. I asked my son why he thought that... Said "Pawpaw, old tractor sounded like that, and that's what fixed it". To wrap this up, my 5-year-old son was right.

My brother was this kid… he took apart every engine and electronic he could get his hands on at a very young age, despite my parents pleading with him to leave things alone. In fear of him being a defiant, sociopath, my mom once took him to the pediatrician expressing her concerns (using the exact mentioned adjectives), to which the pediatrician told her to relax, and assured her that these gifted skills would eventually get him very far in life, despite the stressors they caused at the time. He had friends (sort of), but related more to successful, grown adults and could hold conversations with just about any age group as a small child.

His intelligence is still wildly baffling to me, and it’s not at all shocking that the pediatrician’s predictions came true. Today he is a very successful engineer and in his late 30’s… and almost seems BORED.
He was born with the rare ability to work smarter and not harder.

As his older sibling, growing up in his smart shadow totally sucked … but nobody ever said genetics was fair.

My sister’s neighbor had a 4-year-old boy, and I took him and my nephew to the pool. We were having lunch, and the boy asked what time it was. I couldn’t see a clock, so I said I didn’t know. He proceeded to take his lid and straw out of his drink and said I’ll just make a Sundial. And he did. I was very shocked! I told him, Mom, when we got back & she said he has a high IQ. lol.

My wife has always been amazed that I can mentally take things apart, and put them back together in my head. Then just fix things without any real experience of doing it before. I can’t explain how it works, it just makes sense in my head. From blenders, washing machines, computers, cars, guns, toilets, dishwashers, lawnmowers. Chainsaws, pressure washers, etc… just about anything.

About 15 years ago, my orange cat Kiki batted about a dozen small cat toys into a straight line from smallest to biggest to smallest again. That was the only time she ever did something like that.

I went to college at USU from 2015-2019. During a party, I met a kid who said he could answer any mathematical equation without a calculator down to the last decimal point… and he was not lying!

Any math equation I threw at him, whether it be division, multiplication, square root, numbers big and small…. this kid always answered it 100% correct. Down to the last decimal point. I was mind blown.

Howdy.

Mathematician here. I creeped out my teacher in fourth grade. Through intuition, I showed her that there are the same number of integers as counting numbers. I was almost correct in figuring out the formula.

Naturally I got sent to the office for badgering this poor woman lol.

When I was three, I took apart my mom's sewing machine just to see how it worked. Mind you, I've always taken things apart to see how they work. Always reverse-engineering and improving. Well, my parents were very upset. I don't remember it; it's from what they and my aunt told me. But when they left the room, I somehow put it all back together again, and it worked. So there's my claim to greatness lol.

My daughter was 4, almost 5 when my mom and my stepdad took her back to her father’s house. They had not been there before, but my stepdad said he knew the area well and knew where her father lived. Anyway, they ended up getting lost and my mom said that my daughter kept saying she knew how to get there. My stepdad kept dismissing this, and an hour or so into them being lost and quite far from the house, my mother suggested they let my daughter show them. My mother said she recognized houses and what the roads looked like and the lead them straight to her fathers house. My mom and step dad were shocked!