Teachers first noticed Cameron Thompson's talent for numbers when he was four years old. Throughout primary school, Cameron Thompson's best subject was maths. Then, when he was eleven, he took a maths test before entering secondary school. The test was out of 140; Cameron scored 141. "I broke the system," he1 .
Since then, he has continued to2 quickly. He passed two GCSEs (maths and further maths) at the age of eleven and then got the highest grade in his maths A-level before the end of that same academic year. He is now fourteen years old and studying for a degree in maths, an unbelievable achievement if we bear in mind his3
But his academic achievements have not always been4 by social success. "I have the social ability of a talking potato," he admits. In other words, he feels more at ease with numbers than among other teenagers.
5 is not one of Cameron's strong points and, aside from the problems this causes socially, it is now beginning to6 his marks in mathematics. This is because, at undergraduate level, he is expected to give reasons for his answers alongside the answers themselves. Cameron's7 is that he often doesn't know how he has arrived at the answers, even though the answers are usually correct.
Cameron and his family have recently moved house and Cameron is due to start at a new school. He regards it as a chance to make a fresh start and make some friends. The new school specialises in dealing with students who, like Cameron, excel8 but find it difficult to relate to other students. And 9 , on his first day, Cameron did make a new friend—a boy called Tim一mainly owing to a shared dislike of Justin Bieber's music.
Recently, a maths professor from Cambridge University has been looking at Cameron's work. His advice to Cameron is perhaps 10 . Professor Imre Leader thinks Cameron should11 , stop taking maths exams, and wait until he is eighteen before doing a degree. "There's quite an important12 , " he explains, "between taking lots of exams as fast as you can, and relaxing and enjoying the level that you are at—what we call enrichment. "Professor Leader believes Cameron will do better13 if he stops trying to progress so quickly. And although Cameron does want to finish his current degree, he isn't making any academic plans beyond that. He goes to a weekly karate class after class. And recently, he went to a computer games convention with some friends from karate.
Thanks to the new school, he feels less14 and unusual than he did before. "There are other people like me—high maths abilities, bad school lives—I am not 15 . "
