Most students in Chemistry 14A are around 19 years old, fresh out of high school and ready to take on the challenge of college.

Max Steinberg, on the other hand, was nine.

“I had to get special permission from the dean,” Steinberg said. “It was really interesting to me, but by having the early exposure to subjects at an advanced level, I was able to learn that I love chemistry, but that’s not exactly what I want to do.”

Now 18 years old, Steinberg is on track to graduate from UCLA with both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and will then attend Yale University as a doctoral student. The fifth-year mathematics student has been involved with the UCLA community since he was eight, when he joined the UCLA Olga Radko Endowed Math Circle – a program taught by UCLA undergraduates, graduate students and professors that offers unique mathematical opportunities to promising young students. By age 12, he finished the Chemistry 14 series via UCLA Extension.

Despite his young age, Steinberg said he didn’t feel that people treated him differently when he officially transferred to UCLA at 16.

“I feel like UCLA is very welcoming to a very diverse community of people,” Steinberg said. “It’s not something that has ever bothered me, the sort of feeling like people aren’t going to accept me. … Maybe it felt more daunting when I was younger. But overall, I think that UCLA is a great place for me.”

At UCLA, Steinberg is researching representation theory, which he said focuses on using symmetry to understand algebraic objects. For example, instead of thinking of a square through its basic properties such as having four sides, four right angles and all sides of the same length, it can instead be thought of in terms of its symmetries – a shape that can be rotated or flipped across either diagonal to result in the same shape, Steinberg said.

“For a lot of really complicated mathematical objects that are really hard to think about, this can be a really unique and a really interesting perspective because it helps you understand really complicated things in terms of simpler described things,” Steinberg said.

Steinberg said he became interested in representation theory after taking a class with Raphaël Rouquier during his second year. While he initially struggled with the material, he said he thought the concepts were incredible and went to office hours to learn more.

Rouquier, Steinberg’s unofficial advisor and a professor of mathematics, said his eagerness to learn stuck out to him. After teaching Steinberg in Math 216A: “Further Topics in Algebra,” Rouquier said Steinberg took two more classes with him and added that they later started a research project on representation theory.

“He was always very happy to interact,” Rouquier said. “His way of doing mathematics is not just to be on his own isolating path, I think, which some people might want to do, but he really likes also to interact with people, … very much into learning by talking with other people and also extending what he has done.”

Beyond working on research, Steinberg has also become a math teacher. Along with his friend and third-year mathematics student Logan Hyslop, Steinberg runs a boot camp for incoming freshmen interested in taking graduate-level algebra courses.

Hyslop said Steinberg is one of the maybe five or six undergraduates he knows who would be able to help him with the boot camp.

“He’s grown quite a lot,” Hyslop said. “He’s really mathematically matured and specialized.”

At UCLA, Steinberg said he has an active social life and a variety of friend groups. He was an officer for two years for Enigma, a board game and science fiction fantasy club at UCLA, and enjoys participating in Dungeons and Dragons groups.

Steinberg said he hopes to eventually achieve his goal of being a professor, as he is passionate about both teaching and research. For other accelerated students interested in similar paths, Steinberg says he would recommend learning from others and being able to admit to not knowing something.

“When you’re starting out, especially in something like math, you really don’t know anything – but that’s all the more opportunity to learn, to talk to people who know more than you,” Steinberg said. “Anything in academia is information … passed down from person to person, and talking to people is the best way to facilitate that.”