Chika Ofili

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.

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.

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.

Trevor Noah would also be producing a movie about Tanitoluwa Adewumi, an 8-year-old Nigerian refugee in the US, who went on to win the NY State Chess Championship — after reportedly fleeing from Boko Haram.

–TheCable