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.
Wouldn't it be great if I could find them and put them all in one room with my DS? Mind you, they'd probably talk about Minecraft...
I get the impression that it's unusual for schools to put children in before the target age, especially so much before, so I expect that most of the children who could do that well never get the chance. I have seen of references online to two (different I think!) children doing Cayley, at some time, while one year older than DS; that's all, and UKMT publish no statistics on this kind of thing. I find it really hard to judge how unusual DS is. After the IMC, DH, DS and I concluded this year's paper had been exceptionally easy, explaining DS's high mark. But the thresholds are set as usual, so other people can't have found it so.
I'm definitely interested in how you "nurture mathematicians" as you put it in the other thread.
This is something I witter about often - one thread with a fair bit of me opining in it is
this one about how to make it work for DS-then-6-rising-7 to work independently on his own maths in the classroom. If there are things you'd like to talk about, do start a thread and I will happily witter on it and maybe others will too!
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?
He can and does; indeed this year he is sitting all three. Last April he scraped gold in the Junior (first UKMT experience); in November he got silver in the Senior. From there to qualifying for BMO1 is a biggish step; I don't think I'd expect him to do that next time. He might not even qualify for the Junior Olympiad this year; I need to remember, perhaps, that I was surprised he qualified for Cayley! (Although his teacher didn't seem to be, so, hmm, dunno.)
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.
Fun, absolutely. He will certainly enjoy tackling the problems; his problem is not choosing a presentation so much as the physical act of writing - this is the same kid who was difficult to get to write more than 2-3 sentences for anything not long ago! But I think he'll be fine; the expected ratio of thinking to writing is pretty good in this.
