Meet M. Lavinashree – World’s Youngest Computer Wiz

After passing the Microsoft Certified Professional test, when she was just eight years old, young M. Lavinashree has now become the world’s youngest Red Hat Certified Engineer.

M. Lavinashree was born in rural Tamilnadu, India, but her parents noticed her incredible mind, when she was just a baby. At just 1 and a half, her mother taught her the English alphabet by playing with colored letters. She would dictate the alphabet letters and Lavinashree pointed at them accurately. Then she began learning national symbols, songs, Indian personalities, shapes, fruits, and many other things. When her older sister started studying Thirukural (a Tamil poem written by a sage, over 2,000 years ago), Lavinashree begged her mother to teach her the kurals, and at the tender age of three, she won her place in the Limca Book of Records (Indian equivalent to the Guinness Book of Records) for her photographic memory. She managed to recite 1,330 couplets of Thirukural…

But this was just the beginning for young Lavinashree. Though her parents never forced her to study, they admit they encouraged her to always try new things and develop her interests. This made the child prodigy study computers, and at only eight years of age, she passed the Microsoft Certified Professional test, with a score of 842 out of 1,000. The MCP test measured the ability to perform specific, real world job functions or set of tasks, including installing, configuring and administrating Windows XP. The previous record was held by a 10-year-old Pakistani girl, but Lavinashree’s feat was much more impressive, due to her age.

Time passed, and even though she received numerous audiences with important personalities, including the Indian president and prime-minister, and her name was mentioned in various publications, Lavinashree didn’t just sleep on her laurels. She kept learning new things like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Corel Draw, Flash and became a master at using them.

In August of 2010 M. Lavinashree became the world’s youngest Red Hat Certified Engineer, at 10 year old. Known as the “crown jewel of LINUX certifications, RHCE is a three and a half hours exam that tests things like server configuration and server streaming in Red Hat OS. Lavinashree got an impressive score of 178.1 out of 200 and was praised by Red Hat representatives in Mumbai.
God only knows what Lavinashree’s next feat will be, but one thing is for sure, her future looks mighty bright.