Adragon De Mello

Adragon De Mello (born October 8, 1976) is an American prodigy who graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in computational mathematics in 1988, at age 11. At the time, he was the youngest college graduate in U.S. history, a record that was later broken in 1994 by Michael Kearney.

Childhood Adragon was the only child of Cathy Gunn and Agustin Eastwood De Mello (1929–2003). The elder De Mello was a karate master, flamenco guitarist, and former weightlifting champion. He was obsessed with his son's academic achievements and was prone to "scary" fits of anger. Sometimes, if his partner or his son did not comply with his demands, the father threatened suicide. then head of a world government by age 30, and chairman of an intergalactic government after that. Since his father had set the goal that his son would become a Nobel Prize winner by age 16, he obsessively pushed his son in mathematics and other academic subjects from an early age. His father removed him from the school for gifted students "after tests showed the boy was less gifted than his father believed".

In 1981, Adragon joined Mensa.

After attending seven different elementary schools in the space of just three years, After that, he transferred to UC–Santa Cruz. While he did graduate from university in 1988, some of his math teachers later claimed that his grades were borderline.

Adragon was accepted into a graduate program at the Florida Institute of Technology, but did not enroll. His mother alleged psychological abuse from the elder De Mello, saying that he pushed their son too hard and did not permit her to use the telephone or to be present during interviews. The father died on May 30, 2003.