18-Year-Old Breaks A Record By Becoming The World's Youngest Professor
When Nathan Thomas walked into COP 2270: C for Engineers at Miami Dade College in August 2023, his students were teenagers. So was he. At 18 years and 346 days old, Nathan had already earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electrical Engineering with honors from Florida International University, enrolled in college for the first time at age 10, transferred to university at 14, and was now breaking a Guinness World Record that had stood for 306 years, becoming the youngest male professor in history and taking the title from Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin, who set it in 1717 at age 19. He was also 16 days younger than Alia Sabur, who holds the equivalent record for the youngest female professor, set in 2008 when she was 18 years and 362 days old. Nathan's class involved complex computing and programming material he had studied at a younger age than most of his students, and he walked in and taught it anyway.
He told Guinness that once you are in that setting, everyone is there for the same reason, which is to learn, and that age does not really factor into that. His own love of learning traces back to his parents, both engineers, who surrounded him with that way of thinking before he was old enough to name it. His mother had a way of making things feel simple even when they weren't, he said, and some of that stuck with him more than he realized at the time. Now the part of teaching he loves most is watching something click for a student, the moment when a concept that felt impossible a few minutes ago suddenly makes sense, which he describes as a different kind of satisfaction than solving a problem yourself. Nathan is currently teaching online courses while studying for a law degree at the University of Miami School of Law, planning to specialize in intellectual property law with a focus on STEM when he graduates in 2028. He is 21 years old. Outside all of it, he plays basketball, tennis, and golf, roots for the Boston Celtics and the New England Patriots, and listens to Drake and house music on his headphones. His advice to anyone watching his trajectory and feeling behind their own: everyone's path looks different, and comparing your timeline to someone else's only slows you down. The results come if you keep showing up.
