On the first day of Fall Quarter, Catherine Beni bounds up to the doors of Moore Hall, her long, blonde ponytail bobbing behind her as her blue-sneakered feet fly over the steps and a hefty backpack crammed with texts and notebooks bangs against her shoulders.
Fueled by a breakfast of relatively healthful Smart Start cereal ringed within a moat of ultra-sugary Chocolate Mud & Bugs, Catherine clearly is energized for the day ahead. First there had been PIC 10 — Introduction to Computer Programming — in the Math Sciences building. Now it is time for Italian 4 in Moore Hall, and she doesn’t want to risk being late.
“I need to get there early so I can be sure to get a seat in the front row,” Catherine says somewhat breathlessly. “I always sit in the front row. Sometimes you get these humungous people who sit in front of you and then you can’t see whichever way you try to look.
“And also, if I’m in the front row I can really pay attention and concentrate and nothing else will disturb me.”
As she takes the steps two at a time, her forward momentum seemingly the only thing keeping her upright as gravity wrestles with the oversized knapsack to topple her backwards, Catherine doesn’t resemble a typical college student so much as her favorite storybook character, Tigger, the bounciest creature in all of contemporary literature.
Then again, Catherine is not a typical college student.
She is 12 years old.
It is not unheard of for a student as young as Catherine to enter UCLA, but it is rare. In the 30 years that Gloria Nathanson ’62, associate director of Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, has been on campus, she can think of perhaps 50 very young students who have enrolled, usually in their early teens.
“We don’t get very many, maybe one or two a year,” she says. “The youngest I can recall was 11 years old.”
What is most unusual about Catherine is that she entered UCLA not as a freshman, but as a junior transfer student. She received an A.A. degree in mathematics from Riverside Community College when she was 11, the youngest student ever to graduate from that school.
When students so young enter college it tends to attract national attention. In August, a 12-year-old who started medical school at the University of Chicago drew national headlines. (He had already graduated summa cum laude from Chicago’s Loyola University.)
Catherine’s parents are mindful of the pitfalls of having an exceptionally bright child — and Catherine is not their only one. Her younger sister, Juliet, is on the same trajectory; she is 10 and is expected to graduate from RCC in June and also hopes to transfer the following year to UCLA.
“I’ve read a lot about gifted children,” Catherine’s father, Gerardo Beni M.S. ’72, Ph.D. ’74, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise after his daughter graduated from RCC last year. “Many burn out. In other cases, the parents make them a showpiece, circus performers. Our main goal is for them to be good human beings.”
Beni and his wife, Susan Hackwood, have worked to keep their children out of the limelight — they have deflected attention from Oprah Winfrey, People magazine, Geraldo Rivera and The Tonight Show — hoping to ensure them something of a normal childhood. (They agreed to participate in this story only if it were used solely for university purposes and would not be more broadly disseminated.)
In fact, both girls do seem like remarkably normal kids. Yes, they are exquisitely bright, each in her own way — while Catherine’s talents are in math and science, Juliet is more interested in history, art and philosophy. But they also love bickering as sisters do (“Sometimes it feels like World War III around here,” Hackwood says) and spending time playing with their friends. Disneyland is a beloved haunt — Catherine chose three days at the Disneyland Hotel over a trip to the Galapagos Islands as her community college graduation present. Swimming, skating, baking, playing dress up and squirt-gun fights are favorite activities. Catherine collects Beanie Babies (“There’s about four or five tubs of them out in the garage,” she says), Barbie dolls (“I think there were 110 of them. Most of them don’t have heads now”) and Pokemon cards (“I have billions!”).
“She’s really sweet and thoughtful and she always tries to please everyone else and make them happy,” says her best friend, Sarah Longsdon, who is 14 and has known Catherine since they were in Montessori school together. “Just hanging out at her house is really cool. She’s an all-around great friend. She’s just like a normal kid — except that she goes to college.”
In Catherine’s cluttered upstairs bedroom, the shelves are filled with Disney figurines and Nancy Drew mystery novels, which compete for space with mathematics and physics texts. Her favorite author of the moment is Madeleine L’Engle, whose books A Wrinkle in Time, Many Waters and A Wind in the Door blend science, fantasy and spirituality. Stuffed animals, some wearing little UCLA shirts, are everywhere, but these seem actually to serve a higher purpose; Catherine often studies by sitting with her animals and teaching them the subjects she is learning.
“This is Gwendolyn Riemann Mole,” she says, introducing one of her stuffed pets. “Her middle name is named after the Riemann Integral because I teach analysis to her in order to help memorize my theorems.”
When she talks about a subject she “digs” — like the joys of Neopets, an online virtual-reality game, or Brainpop — Catherine gets all giggly and her words come streaming out in a nonstop rush and her hands fly around and she hardly seems to take a breath and her pale blue eyes shine behind small oval glasses. When a topic really excites her, she punctuates it by thrusting her right arm straight up into the air, transforming herself into a 5-foot 4-inch exclamation point.
“She’s a kid,” says Catherine’s mother, with a smile. “She’s in many ways a regular, normal kid.”
Catherine’s heightened intellect was evident from her earliest years. When she was 3, a teacher at the Montessori school she attended told her parents, both of whom are professors of electrical engineering at UC Riverside, that she had never seen a child who could read as well as their daughter.
For a number of years, they home-schooled her in collaboration with an independent-study academy that specializes in working with gifted children. Later, when there was little challenge left in the high school curricula she was working through, they enrolled her at Riverside Community College. She was 8, and tested into the highest math level possible at that school, calculus.
Mathematics is Catherine’s métier. The symbols, she says, fascinate her.
“I’ve just always liked symbols. I’ve never really liked things having to do with English or with writing because it’s just words, words, words, and to me it just gets boring after a while. So when you deal with something other than words like numbers and symbols, it’s nice. Anything that deals with numbers is basically more appealing to me than anything having to do with writing.”
Catherine enjoys learning Japanese, which her father is teaching her, for the same reason; she is enthralled by the symbols of the written language.
She knows that she’s smart, but there is no pretense about it. Her intellect is not something that she wears on her sleeve. “Very natural” is how Ronald Graham, a UC San Diego computer science and engineering professor who mentored Catherine while she was enrolled at Riverside, describes her. “She’s not geeky or anything. She’s very polite and nice.”
Polite and nice are fine with her friends and family. When it comes to mathematics, a better word might be tenacious. She more or less attacks the subject. “She just wants to learn everything,” Graham says. “It really is something within her. She has an innate ability to see the patterns in things. It is very highly developed. And mathematics, after all, is the science of patterns. She is able to make connections that are very unusual for someone her age.”
Catherine’s ability to discern intrinsic patterns is demonstrated while showing off a print that hangs in her bedroom of Giotto’s Lamentation Over Jesus. “I like this picture because it’s actually geometrical,” she says. “Let’s see, why is it geometrical? If you look at the center, it’s this guy’s head, which is obviously not the main point of the picture. So you follow this line, and because the guy is pointing at the line, you go up here and go to the tree,” she says, tracing the path. “And then it goes to the angels, and the angels are pointing downward … and if you try to look anywhere else these few more men block it. So you have to look here, and that is where the focus of the painting is.”
The moment reminds one of the scene in A Beautiful Mind in which mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe, stands under an intensely star-filled sky with his future wife, played by Jennifer Connelly, and asks her to select any shape she can imagine — she picks an umbrella. Taking her hand, he guides it among the infinite glimmers of the canopy and, to her amazement, tags the exact points of light that describe the pattern she’s chosen.
Both of Catherine’s parents have characterized their daughter’s attendance at UCLA as an adventure and an experiment. They are not pushing her to stay if she feels it is too tough. She can always withdraw, they say, and come back in a few years when she is more seasoned.
“We’ve given her the option to leave many times,” Hackwood says. “She doesn’t have to do this.”
But after six weeks, Catherine is doing well. She made good grades on her midterms and isn’t finding her classes — even the very tough upper-division math analysis course — too daunting. Nor is she deterred by the kinds of technical catastrophes that can ruin the day, week or even quarter of any student. When her computer crashed and devoured four days’ worth of work on a program for her C++ class, she sat down and redid everything from memory in under an hour.
Catherine likens the experience of being at UCLA to that of the characters in the X-Men comics — another of her favorites — who attend Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Students. “Everybody there, and everyone here, has special talents,” she says.
“She’s just tremendously motivated and excited to be at UCLA,” her mother says. “The faculty are wonderful and they’ve been wonderfully responsive to her.”
There’s a certain infectious enthusiasm to her, says Surian Figueroa M.A. ’02, a Ph.D. student in Italian literature who teaches Catherine’s Italian class. “When we are having discussions, she will talk about everything from cartoons to miniature golf to anti-trust laws and economics and math theory,” Figueroa says. One day Catherine brought her collection of Disney comics in Italian to share with the class.
“She’s aware and she is perceptive and just a lot of fun to have in the classroom,” Figueroa says.
And though it would be unrealistic to expect that Catherine would make deep friendships with students who are five or more years older than she, they have taken to her as well.
“There is no way to respond poorly to her,” says Taneisha Berg, a junior film and television student who is in Italian with Catherine. “She’s obviously very bright, and she works really hard. She knows a lot and she is inspired to be here. She’s a really sweet kid.”
But why UCLA? Going to UC Riverside certainly would have been a lot easier on the family. The answer is pretty simple: It’s because that’s where Catherine wanted to go.
“When I was little, the only university I really knew about was UCLA, aside from Riverside where my parents work. I decided I want to go to UCLA because it’s a good school in mathematics and economics, and I thought I wanted to be an economist, so I decided, OK, I’m going to go there.”
Well, maybe that’s not the only reason for coming to UCLA.
“This is a long-term commitment, so what we decided was that she should go someplace that can offer her a full, well-rounded education,” says her mother. “UCLA is a good choice for that because it will provide that richness. And she can take it slowly. There’s no rush.”
Of course, the family had to make some compromises for Catherine to be at UCLA. Where she would live was an issue. A dorm was out of the question; life in the residence halls is pretty much a 24-hour-a-day experience, not conducive for someone Catherine’s age. The family was able to get an apartment a few miles from campus in University Village, the complex for married students. (Hackwood and Beni like the arrangement particularly because there are other children around, the kids of Catherine’s fellow students.) For the Fall Quarter, Beni took sabbatical from UC Riverside to stay with Catherine. On Wednesdays the rest of the family comes up, and they all go back to Riverside for the weekend after classes are over on Friday. Then Catherine and her father head back to Westwood on Sunday evening.
“It’s important for us to do what we can to keep the family together,” Hackwood says. “When I come up on Wednesdays I bring the fuzzy slippers and make hot chocolate with marshmallows. She still needs comfort from her mother.” When the movie Finding Nemo came out on video in November, Hackwood made sure to bring a copy with her when she came up to L.A. so that the whole family could watch it together. “Catherine’s a student during the day,” she says, “but she gets to be a kid in the evening.”
In the winter, Hackwood will trade places with her husband; she has an appointment as a visiting scholar in The Anderson School, where she will work with faculty who are studying the emergence of new technologies.
As for being the youngest student in a school of more than 36,000 students, Catherine says she doesn’t think much about it.
“If someone makes a fuss, I don’t really pay attention,” she says. “I don’t, like, have a neon sign around my neck that says I’m 12.”
