Most of us might baulk at the thought of strolling to the front of a university classroom to correct a lecturer in the middle of a lesson.
But in Terence Tao's defence, such boldness deserves to be forgiven as a mere folly of youth — because he can't have been much older than nine at the time.
It was at that age that the precocious Professor Tao began splitting his education between Blackwood High School (he'd skipped several grades) and nearby Flinders University in Adelaide's south.
"My mum would pick me up halfway through school and take me to my maths classes at Flinders and drive back," he recalled.
"I was a really annoying, noisy kid — I would ask a lot of questions, sit in the front row and, I think once or twice, I would even walk up to a blackboard and correct the lecturer.
"I think I was too young to know what it was like to really be self-conscious and embarrassed."
Today, Professor Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is anything but the type of person to haughtily declare his genius.
Despite routinely being dubbed the "Mozart of maths" in media articles, the 47-year-old speaks of his accomplishments with deep modesty, almost diffidence — but they are undeniable, nonetheless.
If he has a pool room to store his gongs, it would now be overflowing. In addition to dozens of honours including the Fields Medal (the so-called maths Nobel prize), Professor Tao has just been named the Global Australian of the Year.
The honour was bestowed by Advance.org — a federally funded organisation that highlights the work of Australian high achievers.
It lauded "his eagerness to collaborate" and his commitment to "developing the next generation of mathematicians", as well as his own original research.
"I study patterns in numbers, like the prime numbers, trying to understand exactly how they behave," Professor Tao told ABC Radio Adelaide's David Bevan.
"They seem quite random but it's really not clear what their statistics are."
Consider so-called twin primes — prime numbers that are also consecutive odd numbers.
The smallest — three and five, five and seven, 11 and 13, 17 and 19 — seem manageable.
But there are more than 800,000,000,000,000 known pairs, the largest of which have more than 380,000 digits, and it is conjectured, but not proven, that there is an infinitude of such couplings.
It is within such abstract realms as these that Professor Tao spends his professional life.
"Mathematics is the study of patterns and taking a problem and sort of abstracting it to its essentials," he said.
"The reason that's useful is because a technique that you might develop coming from one area of science … can become useful for other areas."
Climate, oceans and a water computer
If numbers contain patterns, so do stories — and there's a certain regularity to accounts of youthful precocity, which tend to single out moments of blinding virtuosity.
The young Mozart, for example, allegedly (and probably apocryphally) transcribed the entirety of Allegri's Miserere after only hearing it once.
In Professor Tao's case, his parents can recall him teaching older children to count when he was only two years old.
"One of my earliest memories is when my grandmother came to help clean the windows. I was demanding that she put the detergent on the windows in the shape of numbers," he added.
But despite his own obvious aptitude, he's quick to point out that higher mathematics should not be regarded as an ivory tower.
"I really do think that maths is for everyone," he said.
"I've seen kids in recess play games like trying to name the largest number and they try to one-up each other, quite literally.
"When you see maths in schools it's all just sums and homework and not super-connected to everyday life so maybe people just end up concluding they're not good at it."
One aspect of maths that is concerned with questions of everyday life is the study of what are known as partial differential equations.
Not only are they of special interest to Professor Tao but they are also at the core of climate modelling.
"I don't directly work in climate science — I work in sort of the more foundational theory behind it," Professor Tao said.
"If you know what the surface of the ocean is doing today, what's the procedure needed to determine what the ocean's going to do tomorrow?"
Water is a slippery subject, and one question Professor Tao has been pondering of late is whether "you can use water to perform computation".
"In principle, you could have this really weird steampunk-type computational machine which is purely made out of water currents interacting with each other," he said.
"I've been trying to see whether the equations of water are complicated enough to build something as complicated as a computer."
According to legend, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered the buoyancy principle that now bears his name while taking a bath, and then ran naked through the streets of Syracuse.
But, even if his water computer could one day become a reality, Professor Tao isn't expecting to replicate Archimedes's "eureka" moment any time soon.
"I don't have time to actually build such a device in my bathtub, but it is a very interesting theoretical exercise," he said.
