Jacob Barnett

Who is Jacob Barnett?

Jacob L. "Jake" Barnett is an American physics student and child prodigy. According to a memoir penned by his mother, he was diagnosed with autism when he was 2 years old and was taught privately by his parents. He showed an interest in physics from a young age, and coauthored and published a physics research paper at the age of 13. In a review of Mrs. Barnett's memoir in Skeptic, educator Chris Edwards described Jacob as an autistic savant, but added that there was no solid evidence that he was "anything more than a typical autistic savant." Psychology professor Dr. Joanne Ruthsatz, who studies child prodigies at Ohio State University, in an interview on 60 Minutes estimated that talents like Barnett's occur in about one in ten million individuals.

In 2011, following a series of YouTube videos published by Barnett's mother, news stories appeared in the media with headlines such as "Autistic boy, 12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity", "12-Year-Old Genius Expands Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong", and "Autistic teenager tipped for Nobel Prize". These claims did not hold up under scrutiny.