From the archives: this story was last updated in April 2019.
William Maillis is literally a “genius.” By the time he was only 7 months old, he was already speaking in full sentences. Just before his second birthday, he was adding numbers, and by age 2, he was multiplying them. Now, Maillis is 11 years old, and he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University last fall with his sights set on becoming an astrophysicist.Yet, Maillis is more than just a child prodigy; as the son of a Greek preacher, Peter Maillis, he’s also a person of great faith. The young scholar is on a self-determined mission rooted deeply in his belief: to use science to prove that God exists. No less.
With all of his remarkable achievements, young Maillis’s “genius” title was made official when Joanne Ruthsatz, a psychologist at Ohio State University, declared it. He graduated from high school at age 9 and more recently became the youngest graduate of St. Petersburg College in July of 2018.
Nor is the young man from Pennsylvania afraid of challenging established ideas. Maillis claims that he can prove both Einstein and Stephen Hawking wrong when it comes to the topic of the universe’s origin, saying that he disagrees with some of their discoveries. In particular, he disagrees with the idea that there is no God—scientists such as Hawking have declared themselves atheists.
To drive home the point, Hawking once wrote the following:
While surely many of his peers are spending their school days shooting paper wads in class or waiting for the home-time bell to ring, Maillis ponders the larger questions of life and the universe. He explains during a question-and-answer period that after he “proves the existence of God” he wants to continue exploring further. “There’s so much we don’t know,” he says, adding with a smile that “there’s even more things that we don’t know we don’t know!”
