Daniel Lightwing

Lightwing started to gain more 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.

Early life and education

Lightwing was born in 1988 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire to David S. B. Lightwing and his wife Carolyn J. née Davidson. He grew up in the Lake District, and Warthill, Yorkshire. 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." He went through many gifted and talented programmes throughout his childhood.

At home, his mother, Carolyn, who was 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.

His interest in mathematics led him to being recruited as a member of the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) team, where he represented the United Kingdom and won a silver medal in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

He was the subject of Catalyst, an Australian television programme in 2008, as well as several Chinese television productions.

He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a Master of Arts degree in mathematics in 2009, as well as Peking University, where he studied computational linguistics. He previously attended York College and St Peter's School, a public school in York.

Lightwing has stated that he has a positive view of autism.

"I wouldn't call it a disability. When you have Asperger's you are putting on a mask and trying to pretend you are normal but what you are thinking is not normal."