Chika Ofili, a 12-year-old
Nigerian boy based in the United Kingdom, has received the ‘TruLittle Hero
Awards’ for discovering a new mathematical formula.
The ‘TruLittle Hero Awards’ is an
annual ceremony that recognizes, celebrates, and rewards outstanding
achievements of remarkable children and young people under the age of 17 years
all over the UK.
At the 2019 edition of the award,
which held over the weekend, Ofili secured an award for discovering a new
formula with which to test for divisibility by seven.
Mary Ellis, Chika’s math teacher,
who is also the head of the mathematics department at the Westminster Under
School, said he discovered the new formula while solving a holiday assignment.
She had reportedly given the
young boy a book, which contained several divisibility tests used to quickly
work out if a figure is exactly divisible by the numbers 2 to 9, but the book
had no memorable test for checking divisibility by 7.
 |
| Ofili with his family |
Chika was said to have solved
this by devising a new formula, which involves taking the last digit of any
whole number, multiplying it by 5 and then adding it to the remaining part of
the number to get a new number.
The young scholar also worked out
an algebraic proof to back this up. If this new number is divisible by 7, then
the original number is divisible by 7, he found.
— Abike Dabiri-Erewa (@abikedabiri) November 11, 2019
Chika isn’t the only Nigerian in
the diaspora to have earned the accolades for a phenomenal achievement in
recent times.
Fathia Abdullahi, a 12-year-old
girl, similarly came to the global spotlight after creating a laundry-folding
robot — barely a year after she started coding — alongside her colleagues who
invented impressive gadgets.
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Congratulations Chika, I celebrate you.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a new formula. It dates back to 1958! https://www.jstor.org/stable/41184089
ReplyDelete