LINCOLN — From an early age, Jay D. Paul was intensely intellectual, taking an interest in everything from national politics to histology, the study of cell and tissue development, a friend said yesterday.

He was particularly good at math. His bedroom was a mountain of books, and he took pleasure in quizzing peers on heady things, like Albert Einstein’s scientific theories.

He was a precocious teen, with an impatience for those who could not keep up with his breakneck pace of learning, and it made him socially awkward, according to his childhood friend Simon Chang.

“He had a keen intellect and a sharp wit, probably one of the smartest people that I have ever come across,” says Chang, today a computer network administrator at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Those who met him in later years, including students at Lincoln High and Middle schools and those who lived in his former apartment complex in Cumberland, remember a reclusive man, still absorbed in his studies.

“He hated to be touched. He wore leather gloves. And he always carried a huge backpack filled with books and notes,” said Ricky Walker, a freshman who remembered him as a teacher’s aide in one of his classes last year.

Paul’s life ended Friday after his car crashed into the front of Lincoln High School, where he worked as an aide and a substitute teacher. He was 34.

No one else was injured in the crash; an autopsy was scheduled for yesterday, but the state medical examiners’ office had not confirmed what many at the school and in the community have already taken as truth: the driver was Paul.

State records show that the license plate on the vehicle was registered to Paul and the police were stationed through Friday night at Paul’s family’s residence on Old Jenckes Hill Road.

The police say that Paul’s car, a Ford station wagon, crashed through the northern entrance of the school at 2:30 p.m., after school had ended.

The crash was followed by an intense fire, caused by some type of accelerant present in the car, the police said. Building staff attempted to pull the driver out, but they could not get there quickly enough.

The school was evacuated and firefighters eventually put out the fire that engulfed the car and parts of the interior of the building. School activities on campus were canceled for the weekend and the building remained cordoned off by police tape yesterday.

School Supt. Georgia Fortunato said the building was inspected by town officials yesterday and deemed structurally sound. School will resume tomorrow. The district will offer psychologists and counselors for students and faculty, Fortunato said.

As workers scrubbed clean rooms and hallways of smoke and soot yesterday and a temporary entry was erected where the car had crashed through, those who remembered Paul reflected on what little they knew of the man they considered kind but eccentric.

Born on March 1, 1974, Jay Deep Paul was the second son of Biswa and Anjali Paul. His father, Biswa, is a 74-year-old retired physician who worked at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket.

Paul grew up in the Limerock section of town, in a two-story, three-bedroom house on Ducarl Drive.

Neighbors there remembered seeing the boy and his older brother, Shuva, walking every morning along the hilly road to the bus stop at the intersection of Old River Road.

But the family moved out of the neighborhood around 1980, when Jay would have been about 6 years old, according to neighbors. The family settled a few minutes south, on Old Jencks Hill Road, a narrow residential street near the Davies Career and Technical High School.

Paul’s parents still live in the modern-style house today. A woman who answered the door yesterday said the family would not be making a statement to the media; neighbors either said they did not know the family or declined to speak to a reporter.

Simon Chang met Paul in 1987 as an eighth grader at Lincoln Middle School, the first year that Chang entered the school district. The two became fast friends, Chang said.

Both driven to succeed academically, they spent their time after school studying at Paul’s house. Other times, they played tennis. “He and I kind of just clicked intellectually,” Chang says.

Even at a young age, Chang remembers that Paul had developed strongly conservative views on national politics. He watched the right wing political pundit Morton Downey Jr.’s short-lived television show into the wee hours of the morning, said Chang.

High academic achievement was a given in the Paul family. Shuva, Paul’s brother, was the valedictorian of Lincoln High School’s Class of 1984 and went on to Brown University, according to Journal records.

“Jay had a lot of pressure in his life, but a lot of it was self-imposed,” Chang said. “He pushed himself beyond what any reasonable eighth grader would do.”

In those years, Paul clearly thrived. He was an honor roll student at the middle school, winning academic excellence awards in social studies, science and French. He won the district’s annual spelling bee while in elementary school and again in junior high.

As a seventh grader, he had the highest verbal score among junior high students in the state who took the SATs, a 630 (out of 800), according to a Journal story at the time.

The score qualified Paul for a special summer program for gifted students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. Chang still has a newspaper photo of him and his skinny, bespectacled friend (and two other classmates) the day they represented the district at the statewide science fair.

Still, Paul couldn’t seem to find the same comfort among people as he found in private study, and he was often impatient with teachers and other students, said Chang.

Paul enrolled in the Wheeler School, a private college preparatory school on Providence’s East Side, and graduated in 1992.

Chang says he lost touch with his friend during those years, but it appears that he continued to enjoy success in the classroom. He also volunteered at Memorial Hospital, where his father worked.

Paul attended Providence College for his undergraduate studies and continued on to Rhode Island College, according to Journal records, where he was a graduate student in history. He eventually made his way back to the Lincoln School District, taking on part-time jobs, from middle school substitute teacher, special education teacher aide, to “scribe,” or someone who takes class notes for students who are injured.

About four years ago, he moved into One Mendon Road, a high rise in Cumberland run by the town’s Housing Authority.

Helen Shurgot, who lives in the apartment directly across from Paul’s old place, remembered Paul, if only for his unchanging appearance: black overcoat, black hat, black gloves — all year-round, even in the summer.

“He was quiet. He locked himself in his room. He never said ‘hi’ to no one,” she says.

Paul moved out two years ago, and his father told Shurgot that he was going back to school.

Shurgot and others at the high rise who remembered Paul had not heard the news yesterday about Friday’s car crash at Lincoln High School. It came as a shock.

“A shame,” she said, looking at the vacant, one-bedroom apartment once filled with the mountain of Paul’s books and papers.

pmarcelo@projo.com