O’Dorney had painstakingly entered data into a computer program during countless trials. He played with numbers to find creative input material that would generate numerical patterns.

“He’s much faster than I am,” says Joseph D. Harris, O’Dorney’s academic advisor.

Last spring, Harris’s colleagues at Stanford and UC Berkeley had told him to look out for “this amazing kid.” Curious, Harris traveled to a math conference where O’Dorney was a participant, and he says he was stunned by O’Dorney’s exceptional ability.

O’Dorney contemplates one day working on number theory—the “most concentrated” form of math, he says. He is uninterested in the potential applications of his work, preferring instead to puzzle over pure math and number theory’s simple equations.

O’Dorney says that he hopes to be a math professor one day.

“He has such a gift for teaching,” his mother says, as she recounts how her son patiently teaches her about the problems he is working on.

FINDING A HOME AT HARVARD

Like all college freshmen, O’Dorney has encountered challenges as he adjusts to college life.

Though he excels in math, he says that he finds written work difficult. He may be an excellent speller, but he struggles to construct essays with structured and focused arguments.

He will take the mandatory Expository Writing 20 this semester, a course he considers an “annoying task.”

O’Dorney joined the Glee Club last semester and spends his free time composing music. Shortly before Christmas, Harvard freshmen witnessed O’Dorney composing a complex musical score on a white board in the back of Annenberg during breakfast. O’Dorney says that he constantly has music in his head that he needs to get down on paper.

He describes the popular music played in Annenberg as “pretty dull.”

Enrolled in two high-level math courses last semester, O’Dorney found that he had little time for socializing with his peers. But his social experience at Harvard, he says, is not important to him.

“He seems blithely untroubled by the same social anxieties that plague the average freshman,” Nardini says.

O’Dorney says he has found a community in the math department. He says that he appreciates the department’s intimate feel and the individual guidance that he receives.

The feeling is mutual. Harris says that admissions recruiters actively seek out talented math students, and that the department is lucky to have O’Dorney as a student.

“He’s content and he’s challenged,” says his mother, adding that O’Dorney has told her that he feels at home among his professors.

“I love Harvard,” O’Dorney says.

—Staff writer Laura K. Reston can be reached at laurareston@college.harvard.edu.