🇺🇸 Nathan Thomas

Nathan Thomas was born on 9 September 2004 in the United States and grew up in Miami in a household of engineers. He credits his mother with shaping how he thinks: 'She had a way of making things feel simple even when they weren't,' he told Guinness World Records, 'and I think some of that stuck with me more than I realized at the time.' Math, he says, was always the subject that 'clicked.'

At age 10 — when most children are in fifth grade — Nathan dual-enrolled at Miami Dade College. Four years later he had earned an associate degree in mathematics, making him the college's youngest graduate at the time. At 14 he transferred to Florida International University, and by 18 — the age at which most students are just leaving high school — he had completed both a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering, each with honors.

Then came the record. In August 2023, Miami Dade College brought him back — this time on the other side of the lectern. At 18 years and 346 days old, Professor Thomas began teaching COP 2270: C for Engineers, guiding a classroom full of students roughly his own age through complex computing and programming. 'Once you're in that setting, everyone's there for the same reason, which is to learn,' he said. 'Age doesn't really factor into that.'

Guinness World Records ratified the achievement and published it on 23 July 2026, and the story ran across NBC News and its affiliate stations nationwide. The numbers are extraordinary in two directions: Thomas beat Colin Maclaurin — the Scottish mathematician appointed professor at 19 in 1717, a friend of Isaac Newton whose record survived 306 years — and slipped 16 days under Alia Sabur, the American who became the youngest female professor in 2008 at 18 years and 362 days. By Guinness's accounting, no younger professor has ever been documented.

Thomas has not stopped accumulating credentials. Now 21, he teaches online courses while pursuing a juris doctor at the University of Miami School of Law, with graduation expected in 2028; he told Miami Dade's student paper The Reporter that he plans to practice intellectual property law with a focus on STEM. 'Engineering taught me how to break down complex problems in a structured way,' he says, 'and that's carried over into how I approach law school.'

For all the records, the picture that emerges from his Guinness interview is deliberately ordinary: a young man who plays basketball, tennis and golf, roots for the Boston Celtics and New England Patriots, plays classical piano and unwinds to Drake. His advice cuts against his own myth: 'Everyone's path looks different, even if the goal looks similar from the outside. It's easy to fall into comparing your timeline to someone else's, but really all that does is slow you down.' What he loves most about teaching, he says, is 'watching something click for a student' — reliving the feeling that started him on this path at age 10.