I enjoyed the concept - I've even written along similar themes myself - but I couldn't quite engage with this story. It spent so very long on the buildup that I was expecting... well, more from the ending. Tom seems to have so many problems, and intellectual shortcomings seem to be the least of them. The shyness, the dissatisfaction with his family, the low self-esteem... I just didn't quite get how being smarter was somehow the answer to his life's dream. It felt like the story veered rather sharply instead of building to the proper conclusion. I don't really understand why Tom was so very attracted to the idea of expanding his mind, such that he was willing to risk his life and health to get it.
"Shy, stutter, nervous, doesn't fit in, has a girlfriend who is WAY out of his league, is jealous of the smarmy jerk who taunts him... so he's going to find a way to another place, where he fits in, right? He wants to leave. He wants a new life. He... uh, apparently I guess he wanted to be a genius. Hunh. I would have thought some of the preliminaries might have leaned a little more heavily on 'I wish I was smarter' not 'I wish I was bolder.'" It's not like his problems can really even be addressed by his newfound intelligence. He's still socially unacceptable and all that.
The random science fiction bits at the end threw me rather a lot. I'm not quite certain where they came from or what purpose they were meant to serve. (And really, if meditating on this formula leads to exponential growth, I would have thought that a computer that did nothing but calculate it further and further out would be some sort of AI god-thing by now. That is, the constant mention of computers made me wonder why computers weren't involved in the mathemagical ritual in any way.)