Originally Posted by ColinsMum
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 :-)

That is extremely impressive. You must be wondering if there are even half a dozen other 9 year olds in the UK that did at least as well. wink

I'm definitely interested in how you "nurture mathematicians" as you put it in the other thread.

I'm not familiar with these British maths competitions so I googled them. Can he enter both the Intermediate and Senior Challenges in the same school year, so that he can attempt to make it into the Senior Olympiad but hedging with the more certain Intermediate one?

Originally Posted by ColinsMum
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
That is terrific, Colinsmum! laugh Is he excited?
Pleased, but I wouldn't say excited really. The follow-on involves writing out full proofs, rather than being multiple choice, and though his writing is much better than it was that's still a bit off-putting to him. I did get his teacher to let him write in pen, though, on finding that he was more worried about being able to write enough in pencil than about being able to do the questions!

I would seriously suggest relax and have fun.

Looking at a sample Cayley Olympiad paper from the website, it seems that the solutions have a fairly sequential structure, so if you know how to solve them you ought to be able to write down your line of thought.