I remember as a young child, during one of my frequent trips to the local library, spending hours looking at book after book trying in vain to find one that had my name on it. Because there were so many books in the library, with so many different names on them, I’d assumed that one of them — somewhere — had to be mine. I didn’t understand at the time that a person’s name appears on a book because he or she wrote it. Now that I’m twenty-six I know better. If I were ever going to find my book one day, I was going to have to write it.

There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.

You don't have to be disabled to be different, because everybody's different.

Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.

My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get it wrong. That's the beauty of love.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to 'intelligence' than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person's mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.