For those parents whose children sat the UMKT Intermediate Maths Challenge from the 1st - 4th February, I’ve pulled together the last 24 years of grade boundaries. Going forward, you’ll be able to find yearly updated boundaries on my website Grade Boundaries
Read MoreGrigori Perelman, 54
Alex Gerko, 41
Demis Hassabis, 44
Terence Tao, 45
Sir Martin Hairer, 45
Alexandra Botez, 25
Wang Pok Lo, 16
Sir Roger Penrose, 89
Jim Simons, 83
Hou Yifan, 26
Read MoreMilo 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.
Read MoreDr Jamie Frost’s tuition website went viral during lockdown, helping millions of pupils around the world with their studies.
A London mathematics teacher has been shortlisted for a $1m (£780,000) international teaching prize after his tuition website went global during lockdown, helping millions of pupils in the UK and around the world to continue their maths studies at home.
Read MoreAs well as institutional rankings, The Sunday Times and The Times have identified the centres of excellence within each of 67 subject areas. The subject rankings are based on student opinion on teaching quality and their wider university experiences, combined with the outcomes of the 2014 research assessments, graduate job prospects and course entry standards.
Read MoreA coalition of private and state schools is expected to launch a campaign to end GCSEs, as growing numbers of schools look at alternatives to the exams following the summer algorithm debacle.
Eton, Bedales, St Paul’s girls’ school, Latymer upper school and several substantial academy chains have been joined by Margaret Thatcher’s education secretary, Kenneth Baker, who created GCSEs, to discuss proposals for replacing the exam system.
The group, Rethinking Assessments, is likely to launch a formal campaign in the next few weeks, forcing ministers into a battle for control of school qualifications.
Read MoreNB Parents can nominate children. Please see the rules at the bottom of this page.
The Maths Masterclass Tutorials are an intense programme of FREE online Maths tuition designed to stretch and challenge the very best young mathematicians
Following the huge success of our pilot in May, we are now scaling up to a year-long FREE programme. The Maths Masterclass Tutorials programme is delivered by TalentEd in partnership with best-selling author Dr. Simon Singh.
Read MoreMartin Hairer takes $3m Breakthrough prize for work a colleague said must have been done by aliens.
A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia.
Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.
Read MoreI found this extremely interesting. I know a few adults and children with high functioning autism.
The scientist Dr Camilla Pang considers autism to be her superpower. What sets her apart from ‘neuro-typical’ people also helps her to explain their emotions
Dr Camilla Pang tells an instructive story about how her brain works. One day, when she was a child, she answered the phone at home. The conversation went as follows: “Hi Millie, is your mum there?”
“Yes,” she replied, and hung up.
Read MoreI have a 12 year old, maths head of a daughter, who has MIT or CalTech aspirations. I will show her this article this week. I have found out recently, that if she’d like to study maths at MIT, she needs to be one of the UK’s top mathematicians! No pressure!!!
In 1966, MIT student Allan Gottlieb published his first Puzzle Corner in the MIT Technology Review.
More than half a century later, Gottlieb – who has been a computer science professor at New York University since 1980 – continues to publish Puzzle Corner in every issue.
Read MoreMy year 7 daughter has begun her 12 week countdown to the UKMT (UK Maths Trust) JMC (Junior Maths Challenge - year 8). This year she's decided to use only past papers, which has meant I spent part of last week printing papers & answers to create folders (JMC 1999-2019, Kangaroo bonus 1999-2019, Olympiad 1999-2019 and IMC 1999-2019 papers). She used the IMC (Intermediate - year 11) for her Kangaroo bonus round practice last year, scoring 112/135.
Read MoreA boy of 15 is well on his way to becoming the youngest British male to hold the title
He started reciting poetry at the age of one, studied with the Open University when he was nine and passed an A-level equivalent maths exam at the tender age of twelve.
Now Wang Pok Lo, a prodigy whose family moved to Scotland from Hong Kong, is poised to become the youngest British male to hold a PhD.
Read MoreWhat happens when you bring together high-school students, teachers, and technology entrepreneurs to experiment with new ideas for learning? Christoph Wittmer talks about shaping the future of education with innovation.
Read MoreThanks to the information revolution, a stunning 90% of the data created by humanity has been generated in just the past two years.
Yet the math taught in U.S. schools hasn’t materially changed since Sputnik was sent into orbit in the late 1950s. Our high school students are taught algebra, geometry, a second year of algebra, and calculus (for the most advanced students) because Eisenhower-era policymakers believed this curriculum would produce the best rocket scientists to work on projects during the Cold War.
Read MoreThe Evening Standard’s Women Tech Charge podcast is back for series two and Entrepreneur First co-founder Alice Bentinck is this week’s guest.
Hosted by Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, the CEO of STEMettes.org, Women Tech Charge invites women from all areas of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) to share amusing and insightful insights into their careers and what it’s really like to be part of the 17 per cent of the UK’s tech workforce that identifies as female.
Bentinck had her first taste of entrepreneurship when she was 16 and tried the Young Enterprise programme at school. Her team was given £10 and tasked with coming up with a product.
“It was just the beginning of understanding that business was a thing and that start-ups were a thing and just the rush of having a small team, creating a product and then selling it to people and they will give you money.”
Read MoreEver tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. But try to succeed 85 per cent of the time.
Scientists have discovered that there is a perfect amount of failure, suggesting that those who get the answers wrong 15 per cent of the time while studying have found the optimum difficulty level to stimulate fast learning.
Researchers said that a success rate of 85 per cent, or getting about six of every seven questions or challenges right, was the “sweet spot” for fast learning, explaining that anything above this is too easy and anything below is too difficult.
Read MoreAnother year, another wave of students trampling across autumn leaves, making their way to their first lectures heady with a cocktail of excitement, apprehension and a nasty hangover. But while every year brings new faces, one feature of the academic landscape remains ever-present: the huge, imposing blackboards.
Now photographer Jessica Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has thrown a spotlight on this workhorse of academic endeavour, travelling across the US and beyond to capture the blackboards of mathematicians.
Read MoreA director at the world’s most successful strategic consulting firm has brought the data-mining techniques of her day job to a decision with which many parents wrestle: how to help offspring choose a university course.
Tera Allas, director of research and economics at McKinsey and a self-confessed geek, said that it came as “no surprise” to her family when she launched a fact-based analysis and created a “prioritisation algorithm” to help her daughter weigh up courses.
Read MoreThe key to better health, both financial and physical, could involve a mathematical brain teaser.
Psychologists have found that those with higher numeracy skills tend to make better decisions that affect their physical wellbeing as well as their finances.
Read MoreA friend spotted this and knew I would be interested.
Something very exciting happened last Friday when one of my pupils, Chika Ofili, popped into the classroom and asked if he could tell me something he had thought of over the summer holidays. I was intrigued. I had given him a book called First Steps for Problem Solvers (published by the UKMT) to look at over the holidays and inside the book was a list of the divisibility tests, which are used to quickly work out whether a number is exactly divisible by either 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 before you actually start dividing. Except that there was no test listed for checking divisibility by 7. The reason why it was missing is because there is no easy or memorable test for dividing by 7, or so I thought!
In a bored moment, Chika had turned his mind to the problem and this is what he came up with. He realised that if you take the last digit of any whole number, multiply it by 5 and then add this to the remaining part of the number, you will get a new number. And it turns out that if this new number is divisible by 7, then the original number is divisible by 7. What an easy test!
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