Rapper Kanye West thinks he may be the next Steve Jobs, telling Rolling Stone "I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump."
However, the publication also thinks Tim Cook, Lena Dunham, Jonathan Ive, Neil Young, Mark Zuckerberg, Ashton Kutcher, and Marissa Mayer could also very well be the deceased Apple founder's successor. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal speculated that Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk might just fill in the innovator's shoes.
So many nominees, so many candidates, but so little consensus. Will there ever be "the next Steve Jobs"? Or will we be getting an even better version of him in the future?
If you ask Wired magazine, the publication will tell you that the person to follow Jobs' footsteps does not own a company or even have an album, movie, or millions to her name. That's because she's just a 12-year-old girl living in Matamoros, a city in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
So, what is it about the girl that made the tech magazine make such an audacious declaration? In 2012, "this tween, the youngest of eight children, scored a maximum of 921 in Mexico's version of the SATs -- making her test score the best in the nation," Fox News reported.
However, Wired did not miss the fact that Paloma Noyola Bueno's capabilities is also in part due to her teacher's method of education. It should be noted that the girl "attends a school that sits next to a municipal waste dump and is supported by her mother and other family members who get by selling scrap metal and food in the streets."
Paloma's teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa, was inspired by "the work of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK."
Mitra is described as a leading proponent of minimally invasive education, a student-led learning style that "lets students tap into their own curiosity and self-learning to solve problems."
Correa took Mitra's lead and conducted his classes with increasingly less intervention, allowing his students to figure out answers to mathematical problems on their own, albeit in groups.
In this new learning environment, Paloma's genius shone and got recognized. She has since become a "media darling" in her home country.
"If Paloma had the same opportunities or open doors as Steve Jobs, she probably would be a genius in this subject," her teacher was quoted as saying.