The Times: INTERVIEW - Meet Milo Beckman, the whizz-kid making maths supercool

Milo Beckman was studying advanced algebra when he was 8. By 15, he was a Harvard prodigy. Now aged just 25, he’s written a brilliant book that takes everything we know (and fear) about maths out of the equation – starting with numbers.

Sometimes, in the school corridors, Milo Beckman’s fellow pupils would accost him, wondering what someone so young was doing there. “It was annoying,” he says. “They would pinch my cheeks and ask me where I was going.”

Later, as a 15-year-old at Harvard, he confesses it also took him time to adjust. No one pinched his cheeks, but, “My first year was not my favourite year of my life, you know. There are social aspects to college that, no matter how much schooling you’ve done, you aren’t necessarily prepared for.”

While he might not have necessarily been the frat boy type, he clearly did adjust. In 2015 in his final year, at the same age of many of those in their first, he wrote a column in the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

Current headlines in the Cambridge, England, student newspaper are: “Fez club to close permanently” and “Investigation: Cambridge best city in zombie apocalypse”. Its counterpart in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is not like that.

In his column he advised, from his lofty experience, that the new crop of freshmen be wary of specialising too soon. “Academia is in desperate need of cross-pollination,” the 19-year-old Beckman wrote. “Institutional barriers beget intellectual barriers.”

Milo Beckman’s Math Without Numbers (Penguin, £20) is out now

The full article (paywall) is available here: Meet Milo Beckman, the whizz-kid making maths supercool