Just 18, Caltech senior makes a big splash

When 18-year-old Chris Hirata packs away his Caltech diploma this month to enter Princeton’s prestigious graduate physics program, some of his professors and associates on campus think he’ll take with him much more than a likely 4.2 grade point average when the final grades are tallied.

Unlike other mathematics prodigies, who are often stereotyped as loners with no real peers, Hirata has been active socially and athletically—including as a member of the varsity swim team—since he arrived on campus at the age of 14. In fact, one of his prime goals was to avoid being stigmatized as the youngest kid in the group.

Hirata, a slim and athletic young man who looks and talks like a typical 18-year-old, has clearly been a standout among a student body of standouts. Upon arriving at Caltech in 1997, he earned one of the highest scores in history on the Institute’s mathematics diagnostic tests, thereby foregoing freshman calculus and sophomore differential equations for a more difficult upper-division class. And his early mastery of physics, his chosen field, is even more impressive. On the Graduate Record Exam advanced subject test in physics, he scored a perfect 990.

Hirata has encountered few, if any, academic challenges he couldn’t rise to during his four years at Caltech, which is famous for its notoriously tough undergraduate curriculum. But he especially prides himself on having been accepted as a peer and even as a leader by fellow students, despite his age.

“I can think of myself as being 18, or as a college senior,” says Hirata. “I prefer the latter.” Though he admittedly felt his age when he began college four years ago, he thinks he had pretty much overcome the stigma of being a young student by the time he was 16. Probably the most significant effect of his age, for a while, was on his varsity swimming performance. But he says he became more competitive toward the end of his undergraduate career.

And clearly almost everyone else on campus sees Hirata not just as an 18-year-old, but as a gifted and accomplished graduating student. In terms of social maturity and leadership ability, Professor of Planetary Science and Geology, Emeritus, Bruce Murray thinks Hirata is an exceptional Caltech product.

“He’s an extraordinary young man, of whom we are very proud,” says Murray, a former JPL director who cofounded the Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Louis Friedman. “Most students here consider him the unquestioned expert in physics, mathematics . . . almost anything else he talks about. He’s the one who other students just assume will know the answer.”

Murray got to know Hirata through the campus Mars Society, of which Murray is the faculty adviser. The society works on various projects associated with the exploration of Mars, but is particularly interested in helping pave the way for the human exploration of Mars, Murray says.

Fellow Mars Society member and friend Derek Shannon says he has been impressed by Hirata’s diligent work toward that end. “He’s quite a bit different from a lot of Caltech geniuses I know in that he really has a selfless motivation to make space exploration happen,” says Shannon, a Caltech junior.

Markus Keel, Todd Instructor in Mathematics, is also impressed with Hirata’s combination of ability and maturity. “He does not come across as a pain-in-the-ass Doogie Howser type,” says Keel, who taught Hirata differential geometry two years ago.

Keel’s favorite anecdote about Hirata concerns a difficult problem on the final exam. Before putting the problem on the test, Keel had consulted two colleagues. One said he didn’t see right away how to solve the exercise, while the other said that he didn’t even believe the conclusion of the problem. Hirata not only solved the problem as Keel had framed it, but wrote that he knew of an easier way, and included that solution on the back of the exam.

“He’s the strongest undergraduate I’ve ever encountered, either in my personal experience at the University of Chicago or in the years I’ve taught at Princeton, UCLA, and Caltech,” Keel says.
Peter Goldreich, DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics, has a similar assessment of Hirata’s performance in his planetary dynamics class. “He’s a terrific student,” says Goldreich. “He was the best in the class, even though it was a graduate course and he was the only undergraduate.”

David Baltimore, president of Caltech, notes that Hirata’s parents have also been integral to his success. “We rarely encounter a scholar so young who is able to take advantage of Caltech,” says Baltimore. “It is a credit both to Chris’s brilliance and to his parents’ commitment that he could be so successful.”
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