How to spot a genius

Illustration: Mariaelena Caputi

Sep 23rd 2025|Cambridge|10 min read

Ervin Macic was despondent. While in school he twice won medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and researched artificial intelligence, trying to speed up how models make predictions. He dreamed of one day joining an AI lab to make the technology safe. Yet the 19-year-old Bosnian prodigy was unable to take a place at the University of Oxford: its fees of £60,000 a year were five times his family’s annual income. So he went to the University of Sarajevo, where he sat programming exams on a decades-old computer.