Daniel Lightwing
| Daniel Lightwing | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Daniel James Lightwing 1988 (age 28–29) Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | English |
| Other names | 李轶睿、武璟轶、光翼 |
| Education | Studied Natural Language Processing, Peking University (2009–2011) MA Mathematics, University of Cambridge (2006–2009) MA Oriental Studies University of Cambridge (2008-2009) |
| Occupation | Co-founder of Castella Research |
| Years active | 2006–Present |
| Known for | Silver medalist at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad |
| Notable work |
Beautiful Young Minds (2007) X+Y (2014) He was the subject of Catalyst, an Australian television programme in 2008, as well as several Chinese television productions. |
| Partner(s) | Li Yijie |
| Parent(s) | David and Carolyn |
Daniel James Lightwing is a co-founder of the London-based Internet/Gambling business Castella Research, which uses high-frequency trading inspired methods to place bets on sports exchanges. He was previously a web backend developer for the London offices of Google. In 2006, he represented the United Kingdom at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he won a silver medal. His experience at the IMO was described in the 2007 BBC Two British television documentary, Beautiful Young Minds, and the 2014 British dramatic film, X+Y (released in the United States as A Brilliant Young Mind).
Lightwing also started to gain fame in China from 2016 onwards, particularly on the website Zhihu, where his articles written in Chinese, covering a broad range of topics had attracted over 170,000 followers within one year.
Lightwing grew up in the Lake district, and Warthill, York, England. In 2015, he described that, before the age of nine, he “had no particular attraction to mathematics. I learnt to read very young, before attending primary school. And I did read all kinds of things—books aimed at children 5–10 years older. At primary school, I read the entire library.”
As his education developed, his teachers “were a little perplexed what to do with me.” He described how he wasn’t learning anything he hadn’t already learned and was bullied by one of his teachers who expected him to “sit under her desk and be ridiculed” for no apparent reason. The bullying increased after he “got extremely angry and jumped on top of the desk to denounce her.”
After some intensive personal instruction within a special ‘one-to-one’ mathematics class with another teacher, he learned that he enjoyed those classes, and stated that, “before long, I had made my mind up that maths was what I wanted to do.”
At home, his mother, Carolyn, a maths and science teacher, had researched Asperger syndrome (AS) when he was 16 years of age after reading the 2003 mystery novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and, later, took him to a diagnostic consultation with University of Cambridge autism researcher and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen FBA who diagnosed Daniel with AS. Parts of the consultation were included in the 2007 BBC Two British television documentary, Beautiful Young Minds.
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