Math whiz gets Ph.D. at age 20

Nets Katz first taught himself how to read TV Guide at age three. He could do complex mental calculations of the square roots of non-finite numbers at age five. He read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at age nine. Katz, 20, has whizzed through college and graduate school in his short life and will receive his doctorate in math at the University this spring. Then it's north to Yale University, where he will teach and do research. "He's always been very, very bright," said Aya Katz, Nets' older sister, in a bit of an understatement. "I think he's got everything under control . . . everything's lined up . . . he's on cloud nine," she said of her brother's life of academic achievement. Mathematics Professor Dennis Deturck, Katz's advisor, also praised his student's genius. "He's very fast," DeTurck said. "A lot of times I've had to struggle to keep up with what he's been doing." Katz tells his short life history with modesty. "I started out going to elementary school like a normal person," he said of his humble beginnings in Grand Prairie, Texas, a suburb of Houston. But things quickly changed for the boy wonder who single-handedly produced his own newspaper in grade school and excelled in math, his sister recalls. By the time Katz was in fourth grade, a teacher from his local high school had taken interest in the young math standout and enrolled him in a high school math class. As a sixth-grader, Katz competed in a state-sponsored math contest for ninth graders, winning second prize, only to be disqualified because he was not in the right grade. Although Katz was forced to forfeit the honor, South Grand Prairie High School decided to admit the whiz kid at age 11. He graduated high school at age 14, entering Rice University with about a dozen Advanced Placement credits and flying through in just three years. But Katz's life has not just been one big equation. At Rice, he led a four-man political organization called the Rice Libertarians. And once he stirred the normally "politically apathetic campus" at Rice by helping to steal all the books from the school's small Weiss College Library. In protest against the university's decision to move the books from the one-room library to the main library, Katz and his friends "borrowed" all the books and hid them in their dorm rooms until the decision was rescinded. It seems that Lady Luck beamed on Katz when he was applying to graduate schools, or so Katz says. Katz said he had already finished mailing off his applications before he came to see DeTurck give a speech at his school. After the lecture, one of Katz's friends went to speak to DeTurck and get an application while Katz waited outside the auditorium. Impatient with his friend for taking so much time with the professor, he returned inside and ended up being "talked into applying" by DeTurck. "It more or less happened by itself," Katz said mild-manneredly of his acceptance to the University's graduate program. Breezing through the University Ph.D. program in three years, Katz recently finished the first draft of his thesis on the inverses of matrixes of differential operators. "I was extremely lucky that something that I tried worked," he said of his thesis.

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