What About Tomb Raider?

The New York Times offers an article profiling Terence Tao, mostly focussing on his child prodigy background:

Dr. Tao has drawn attention and curiosity throughout his life for his prodigious abilities. By age 2, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his Ph.D.

Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius" award that comes with a half-million dollars and no strings.

There's no mention of his blog, or the Tomb Raider Interpretation of quantum theory.

I'm always a little ambivalent about these sorts of articles. While on the one hand, it's fascinating to read the life stories of really brilliant people, there's always a faint undercurrent of "look at the freaky smart guy!" to them that makes me wonder if they aren't counterproductive. They leave the impression that science and math are something that require phenomenal natural talent, and that people who aren't child prodigies shouldn't expect to understand it.