-- I was born in 1960.

-- I got my first algebra book when I was 4, and aced the subject immediately.

-- I had one IQ test score higher than the one that got Marilyn vos Savant into the Guinness Book of World Records.

-- The National Merit folks thought that I was the youngest winner of their scholarships until that day.

-- I got a math PhD from Harvard when I was 19.

-- At least up to a point, I check a lot of the usual boxes, like music and chess.

That said, I was not some kind of math genius. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi were at Harvard when I was, having started in grad school at 16 and 17 respectively (I started at 16), and both were clearly better at math than I was, even adjusted for age.

More particularly:

-- When I was young, I was really, really good at keeping a problem in my mind and worrying at it until I made progress. I could fall asleep doing that and keep going when I woke up. I understand that's quite unusual, and as I aged I lost the ability myself.

-- I'm not particularly good at spatial reasoning. I can power my way through some of it by raw inferencing, at which I am indeed very good, but that's about it.

-- I can learn a bit about any subject and appreciate key issues in it very, very quickly. That's reflected in my actual career, and also in the large number of subjects I dabbled in in school.

-- I probably COULD have been world-class somewhere in the vicinity of economics/public policy (as academic areas). But I was burned out on academia at age 21, after 9 years at universities, left for the business world, and never went back.

-- I don't know how good I'd have been as a computer scientist. I never tried.