12-year old Indian origin a Math genius

A very unlikely, and the most awe-inspiring, delegate made her presence at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2010. 12-year-old Kaavya Jayram, who presented a paper on her results in the area of integer partitioning - expressing numbers as the sum of other numbers, was the youngest person at the International Congress of Women Mathematicians, a satellite conference that preceded the ICM reports Indian Express.

Her paper will be published by the International Journal of Number Theory. Parimala Raman, an invited speaker at ICM and one of India's most well-known experts in algebra who is now the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University, U.S. said, "She is really good and she is way ahead of her age. She is interested in problem solving and research, taking great courses at Stanford. She was at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in December when I gave a talk. We've been in touch."

Kaavya took a fancy to number theory after attending a definitive lecture on the subject at IIT Kanpur by Professor Manindra Agrawal who heads the institute's computer science department.

She was home schooled by her mother as she had attained the tag of a 'problem child' at school, thanks to her intelligence. She decided she would be a mathematician, when eight, and began taking courses at the San Jose State University and Stanford University, the latter at the invitation of noted number theorist Kannan Soundararajan.

Kaavya says of her fancy for numbers, "What I like about number theory is there are so many unsolved problems which seem simple but have stumped mathematicians for years."

Presently the family is based in California's Bay Area and is in India for a year. After this, Kaavya will go to university full time, perhaps to Berkeley or Stanford.