This 10-year-old genius is starting college classes for math degree

Mar 11, 2015

Esther Okade is a British-Nigerian math rock star. CNN is reporting that at ten years old, she is one of the country’s youngest college freshman. She had enrolled at the UK-based distance education program Open University and has already risen to the top of her class, scoring a 100% on her latest test.

“It’s so interesting. It has the type of maths I love. It’s real maths — theories, complex numbers, all that type of stuff,” she said. “It was super easy. My mum taught me in a nice way.”

She then said, “I want to (finish the course) in two years. Then I’m going to do my PhD in financial maths when I’m 13. I want to have my own bank by the time I’m 15 because I like numbers and I like people and banking is a great way to help people.”

Okade could have started college at an even younger age, but she had to beg and plead with her mother for three years first. “I actually wanted to start when I was seven. But my mum was like, ‘you’re too young, calm down,'” Okade recalled.

Okade’s mother said that she had initially enrolled her in a private school but that they switched to homeschooling after she came home from school crying one day.

“One day we were coming back home and she burst out in tears and she said ‘I don’t ever want to go back to that school — they don’t even let me talk!'” she recalled. “In the UK, you don’t have to start school until you are five. Education is not compulsory until that age so I thought OK, we’ll be doing little things at home until then. Maybe by the time she’s five she will change her mind.”

By the time she was four, she was doing quadratic equations.

Now, Okade is on her way to graduation, and her brother, Isaiah, isn’t far behind. He will be taking his first A-level exam in June, at just six years old.