It is quite an achievement at any age. But gaining a first-class degree in maths at 15 is nothing short of remarkable.
That’s just what Yasha Asley has done – collecting his first class degree just a month after his 15th birthday, making him one of the country’s youngest ever graduates.
And this young Einstein – aptly nicknamed the ‘human calculator’ – did it in style, achieving 92 per cent. The University of Leicester graduate was awarded his BSc on Tuesday, accompanied by his father, Moussa, a 54-year-old Iranian who quit his job as an accountant to look after his only child.
Yasha, who took his A-levels aged eight, now plans to start a PhD in mathematics at Leicester in September, and aspires to become a research mathematician.
But his father insisted his life wasn’t only about maths.
Mr Asley, from Leicester, said: ‘He didn’t study all the time – that would be awful. Yasha was top of the class with grades higher than anyone else.
He is believed to be the youngest person in the world to have achieved a grade A or A* in maths – scoring 100 per cent and 99 per cent in two of the six papers.
The prodigy was privately enrolled on to A-level examinations by his father without telling the boy’s headmaster at Folville Junior School in Leicester, and took them at a local college.
Now 45, she lives with her family in Jerusalem and teaches maths at the Hebrew University.
She is an expert in the field of mathematical knots, an extremely complex branch of algebra.
Ten under-17s have graduated in the UK since 2012, although their precise ages were not recorded.