GENIUS Prodigy succeeds in many subjects

Most students who are admitted to the prestigious music school are 18.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- At the tender age of 12, math wiz and piano prodigy Kit Armstrong has already been compared to Mozart. His teachers, however, disagree.
"Mozart didn't do math, and he didn't go to university when he was 9," said Eleanor Sokoloff, 89, Kit's piano instructor at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music.
"I've had a lot of children, but this one is different," said Sokoloff, a teacher at the world-renowned music school for 68 years. "I mean, let's call him what he is: He's a genius."
And he's not just a wiz at music. When not practicing or composing, he's studying chemistry and abstract algebra at the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks Chinese, Taiwanese, English and says that he learned Russian but has already forgotten it.
For now, many piano pieces are physically out of Kit's reach. Small for his age, he can barely reach an octave on the keyboard -- but that doesn't diminish the awe of his teachers.
"He looks like a child, but he plays like a master," said Claude Frank, an acclaimed pianist who is another of Kit's instructors at Curtis. "His thinking about music-making is unbelievably mature. He has discovered things in classical music that I have not discovered in 70 years."
What's ahead?
Kit recently landed professional management, from the same talent agency that represents Jennifer Lopez, Diane Keaton and Yo-Yo Ma. Interview requests are streaming in, and he already has been on David Letterman, but Kit says he's not sure what profession he will enter.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I never thought about it."
All this, and he's a nice kid to boot.
"There is no putting on of airs, no facade. It's just simply Kit," said David Ludwig, the youngster's composition teacher. "He has somehow managed to avoid the attitude that some other 12-year-olds -- and we all know them -- have. It's like that baseball phrase: 'I'm just happy to be here.'"
Admission to Curtis is so tough that just 46 of 867 applicants who requested a spot for next year were accepted. Students usually enter at age 18, though superstar pianist Lang Lang was 13 and violinist Hilary Hahn was 10 when they started at Curtis.
"My first compositions were really complete gibberish," Kit said. Then at the ripe age of 6, "Through some unclear transformation, I wrote my 'Chicken Sonata,' and that was my first real piece of music."
He describes the piece as "a collection of four chicken pieces. In the classical style."
He stays up late composing works such as "The Triumph of a Butterfly" and "Piano Quintet in G, Bugs." He largely splits his time between Philadelphia and his hometown of Anaheim, Calif., where he has two pet chickens named Nitrogen and Carbon.
"I have found them to be loving and cute and funny," he said.
Achievements
Kit started playing the piano at 5. He started speaking at 9 months and by age 2, he was busy reading Business Week and the New York Times, according to his mother.
"It's something Kit can be proud of, but not really, because he was born with that talent. It's what he does with his talent that matters," said May Armstrong, 48, who now devotes all her time to taking her only child to Penn and Curtis for classes, and to New York and London for piano lessons.
Pianist Gary Graffman, now Curtis' president and director, knows Kit's experience. He entered the school at age 7 and became an esteemed composer and pianist at a young age.
But unlike many musical geniuses, Kit has other astounding abilities as well.
"Inside, one is always worried and hopeful," Graffman said. "He is spreading himself very thin. Obviously, everything comes very quickly to him, but still, he may decide in the not-too-distant future on one thing or the other. Can one be a great pianist and a great composer and a great scientist? Because they all take a lot of time."