There's a fair chance you spent your 18th birthday worrying about board exam results or college admissions. Nathan Thomas spent his walking into a lecture hall as the professor, not the student. The teenager from Florida has officially entered the history books after Guinness World Records confirmed him as the youngest male professor ever, a title that had sat untouched for over three centuries. Here's everything to know about the young engineer-turned-educator who is now also chasing a law degree on the side.
The record that stood for 306 years, gone
Guinness World Records confirmed that Thomas set the new benchmark when he joined the faculty of Miami Dade College in August 2023, at the precise age of 18 years and 346 days. The confirmation itself came only recently, with the record body officially recognising the feat in late July 2026.
Before Thomas came along, the record belonged to Colin Maclaurin, a Scottish mathematician who took up a professorship at Marischal College in Aberdeen all the way back in 1717, at 19 years of age. That record survived wars, revolutions and the entire modern history of education, until an American teenager who wasn't even born until 2004 came along and quietly ended it.
