Shraman Mitra
Jacob Barnett was just a child when his parents, Michael and Kristine Barnett, decided to adopt Natalia Grace, a six-year-old Ukrainian native. However, shortly after she entered their lives, she allegedly began portraying a violent streak that risked the family’s lives. Investigation Discovery’s ‘The Curious Case of Natalia Grace’ chronicles how the Barnetts’ felt threatened by Natalia and even showcases Jacob’s relationship with his adopted sister. While a lot of the limelight seems to shine on the controversy surrounding her, Jacob has led quite an interesting life himself.
Jacob Barnett was a Child Prodigy
According to Kristine and Michael Barnett, Jacob had exhibited a keen intellect and photographic memory since he was a baby. The stories about his childhood reveal that he had learned to tell exact time by the sun’s position in the sky at a young age; that as a kid in diapers, he would calculate the volume of cereal boxes to a decimal-point accuracy; that during car rides, he would mentally add up the numbers in the addresses that they would pass on the way; that he would represent complex mathematical equations through geometric patterns made of yarn. However, this genius was not without challenges. A sudden shift in Jacob’s behavior arrived over time, and he became uncommunicative to the point that the doctors told his parents that he might never speak again. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s, and some believed that it would hamper his growth in life. However, Kristine refused to accept that and decided to homeschool him, nurturing his talent for science and mathematics.
By age 8, Jacob was auditing physics and mathematics courses at Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). With an IQ of 170, he self-taught calculus in two weeks. At age 12, he started attending graduate-level courses and received his first research grant. Soon, he published his first physics paper, titled “Origin of maximal symmetry breaking in even PT-symmetric lattices.” At 15, he was accepted into the Perimeter Institute, where he researched loop quantum gravity and quantum foundations. In 2012, he became a TEDx speaker (‘Forget What You Know’). He was featured in an episode of 60 Minutes about child prodigies. He also established a business called Wheel LLC out of his mom’s garage. Kristine has written about Jacob’s childhood and his remarkable journey in her 2012 book, ‘The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing Genius.’
Jacob Had a Complicated Relationship with Natalia
Although Jacob Barnett describes himself as Natalia’s adoptive brother, he claims that their relationship wasn’t that deep to begin with. Jacob, Michael and Kristine’s eldest biological son, came into this world in 1998 and was in his pre-teens when Natalia entered the family. Naturally, he and his siblings were overjoyed to find a new playmate, and they happily welcomed her into the family.
Shortly after Natalia entered the Barnett household, she became close to Jacob and often asked to sit beside him. Even though Michael and Kristine initially brushed off her advances as natural, they realized her sinister motives when she allegedly tried to throw the 11-year-old out of a car window. Moreover, a few days later, the Barnetts woke up to find Natalia allegedly standing near the edge of their bed with a knife in her hands. When Jacob found a place at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, the family moved with him, but Natalia was left behind in an apartment of her own where she had to fend for herself. Years later, in the Investigation Discovery documentary, ‘The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,’ Jacob reportedly talked about how he was afraid of her but was also complicit in the abuse inflicted on her by his mother, for which he expressed his apologies. In the same documentary, he also claimed that his mother had collected funds under his name, but he never gained access to any of that.
Jacob Barnett is an Accomplished Scientist Today
Jacob Barnett has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics in Bilbao, Spain, since July 2024 and is currently working on the “mathematics of quantum many-body problems and quantum information science.” He got his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2023, with his thesis being “Locality and Exceptional Points in Pseudo-Hermitian Physics.” He’d pursued his undergraduate program from the same place while working on his thesis, “Fermion Doubling in Loop Quantum Gravity.” He is a former visiting research student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Talking about physics, he said that he does it because he loves it, and through it, he sees the world from a very interesting lens.
In his personal life, Jacob maintains close relationships with his parents, though he mentioned that he has not been in contact with Natalia for years. He could not attend his father’s trial in 2022 since he was working on his doctorate at the time. He has kept the rest of the details about his personal life private, but he does talk about the one thing he loves almost as much as he loves physics: foosball. He has participated in and won several foosball tournaments over the years. In February 2025, he even organized his first foosball tournament, which was live-streamed through his social media account. The ground-breaking thesis work and highly competitive foosball keep Jacob occupied for the most part as he tries to stay away from the media circus generated by the controversy about his parents and Natalia Grace.
Read More: Anna Gava: Where is Natalia’s Alleged Birth Mother Now?
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