At 19, Alia Sabur has become the world's youngest university professor - and she certainly doesn't lack confidence. She announces on her website that she has been making history since she was eight months old, when she started reading, and describes herself as a multitalented record-breaker.

Many of us will have to take her word for that, as little of her four-page CV is comprehensible to the casual observer. “Stochastic calculus and derivatives pricing” is a struggle to type, let alone understand. And while it is true that her new employer, Konkuk University in South Korea, is not quite up there with Harvard, while Stony Brook University in New York, where she started reading physics at the age of 10, lacks the wow factor of Yale, let us not snipe: she has worked on techniques that may one day help to fight cancer and Alzheimer's, and is now working at a deprived university in New Orleans that has been operating out of trailers since Hurricane Katrina.

As if to push the boundaries of overachievement, she also won a black belt in tae kwon do at the age of 9, and was a concert-level clarinettist at 11. It seems at least possible that, having moved from primary to secondary school when she was 5, she achieved at least some of these things because of a dearth of friends. And quite what her fellow university physics students thought of the child with the stuffed toys in their midst, one can only imagine. Still, knowing what “Department for Advanced Technology Fusion” means, let alone being able to teach there, as Sabur will be, is no mean feat.

“I just wanted to know how things worked,” she said recently. “What is science really? It's how stuff works.”

The history of child prodigies illustrates that peaking too soon is not without its perils. Sufiah Yusof, who went to Oxford to read maths at 13, was recently discovered to be estranged from her father and working as a prostitute. Terence Judd, a classical concert pianist at 12, threw himself off Beachy Head at 22. Sabur, however, is a New Yorker and seems more grounded, thanking God and her parents for her success. Her mother, a retired engineer, and father, a television reporter, “encouraged me in anything I wanted to do”, she says. “We believe it is a gift from God.”

Asked about her weaknesses, she admitted being rubbish at basketball - which, all things considered, seems a bearable disability.

“I enjoy teaching,” she said recently. “It's something where you can make a difference. I really feel I can help a lot of people.” Due to take up her post in Seoul this month, she has yet to add “fluent Korean” to her CV but is predictably unfazed.

“I speak maths,” she has pointed out. “And music.” Thank heavens for that.

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