Carson Huey-You took his last final exam at Texas Christian University on Tuesday. Saturday, he will graduate with a degree in physics and double minor in math and Chinese.
It's a commendable accomplishment for any student, made more impressive by the fact that Huey-You is just 14 years old.
"It didn't come easily. It really didn't," Huey-You insisted. "I knew I wanted to do physics when I was in high school, but then quantum physics was the one that stood out to me, because it was abstract. You can't actually see what's going on, so you have to sort of rely on the mathematics to work everything out."
Huey-You first showed an interest in math at the age of 3.
"He asked me if he could learn calculus and I thought, 'hmm, OK,'" his mother, Claretta Kimp, recalled.
Kimp took her precocious toddler to a public school and learned Huey-You had an eighth grade comprehension of math, "too advanced" for his age group. He ended up skipping several grades and graduating high school at 10 years old. By 11, he was a freshman at TSU.
Kimp's other son, 11-year-old Cannan, will start classes at TCU in the fall and plans to major in astrophysics and engineering. He said he wants to one day be an astronaut.
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Both brothers work with their mentor, Dr. Magnus Rittby, a professor at the school who took Huey-You under his wings.
"It was challenging enough with one of them," Rittby said. "As I grow older, I want to tell people that age is not what people tend to think it is, and the same is for young people. I think you can take young people very seriously."
Rittby says he has striven to not put Huey-You in a cocoon where he only learns quantum mechanics and fails to develop as a human in other aspects.
"Just give him as many tools as possible to do good in the world," Rittby said. "His potential is enormous to be able to do things nobody else has done."
Kimps joked that people think she has a "magic pill," insisting there is nothing special in the water at the brothers' house.
"I would hope what's in everybody else's water," Kimp explained. "A lot of love and patience and understanding and commitment."
