First let me do the usual "I love reading this thread, even though I seldom comment" thing, because I do!

My brag: DS9 has his best-so-far piece of externally recognisable validation. He took the UKMT Intermediate Maths Challenge and scored high enough to go on to the follow-on round, the Cayley Olympiad; in fact, his score was high enough to qualify for the highest follow-on, the Maclaurin, but UKMT policy is apparently that you only sit one of the three Intermediate Olympiads and it's whichever is the lowest you haven't aged out of yet. So, he'll be competing against the best 500 entrants who are up to 5 school years ahead of him, and he scored as well as some of the best 500 entrants who are 7 years ahead of him, out of a total UK entry of about 600,000. I'll admit it, I'm proud of him :-)

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