Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old high school student in Irving, Texas who was arrested in a classroom on Monday after a teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb, has attracted admiration from a former secretary of state, a NASA scientist and even US President Barack Obama.

On Wednesday, Obama took to Twitter to invite him to the White House with his “cool clock.”
Presidential contender Hillary Clinton urged Mohamed to “stay curious and keep building.”
Mohamed, of Sudanese origin, is the ninth-grader at MacArthur High School in Irving thrust onto the international limelight after he built a digital clock into a pencil case — complete with circuit boards and a power supply and took it to school on Monday as part of a science presentation.
In what Muslim American activists charge is an instance of “Islamophobia”, later in the day Mohamed, who is Muslim, was brought to the principal’s office and asked whether he’d tried to “make a bomb.” He was then arrested and led through the halls in handcuffs. The incident was originally reported by The Dallas Morning News.

Another high-profile supporter is Bobak Ferdowsi, a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory whose haircut became the toast of the Internet a few years ago.