Child prodigies- they’re the envy of everyone in any field at all. But what’s more amazing are natural-born geniuses in Mathematics. We’ve struggled for years to finish just our Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, struggling through every single subject that always requires different forms of mathematics, and yet once in awhile we see the news about a kid who has almost mastered Mathematics at the age of 9!
Source: GMA News
And this is another one of those jaw-dropping stories. Let us introduce you to Aristotle “Io” Nikolai Calica (Even from the name you can tell he’s a genius). At the age of 8 years old, he has sat through University of the Philippines- Diliman’s Math 54 class, also known as Advanced Calculus, and was able to breeze through the teacher’s questions, envying the crowd of overworked college students.
Source: YouTube, GMA Public Affairs
With a video of him in that exact class going viral, he caught the attention of the Philippine media, and was interviewed for Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho (One at Heart, Jessica Soho), one of the country’s most popular news and lifestyle magazine TV show.
Source: Inquirer
He demonstrated his true genius by mentally solving insane math problems and then using an elementary writing notebook to compute square roots of numbers up to 104 million.
Calica says that he’s happy that he’s been given the privilege to sit in these college math classes regularly. Sometimes, his classmates would look at his answers to the given problems.
Intelligent as he is, he admits that “There’s still a lot I don’t know.” He expands on that he would like to learn about matrices, probability, statistics, and transformations.
Melissa Calica, Io’s mother said in an Interview with Inquirer, “We don’t like to pressure him. Of course, we encourage and nurture his talents: We get him tutors, we let him join contests, we bring him to UP. But what we want is for him to enjoy his youth.”
His parents said that the key is balance. They let him play computer games after his lessons, and they encourage him to read a wide array of books.
“Sometimes, we also worry that by making him go to UP, we’re asking too much from him,” Ianne Calica, Io’s father said. “We don’t want him to think he’s obligated to perform at such exceptional levels. But we also don’t want to snuff out his curiosity. We simply encourage him to do what he wants: math and music.”
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