Twelve-year-old Nigerian boy, Chika Ofili was awarded the TruLittle Hero Award for discovering a new way to divide mathematics. Chika's mathematics teacher, Miss Mary Ellis, who is also head of the mathematics department at Westminster Under School, said he (Chika) discovered a new formula while working on a vacation assignment.
She revealed that she gave Chika a book called First Steps for Problem Solvers (published by the UKMT) to study during the holidays. The book had several divisibility tests which are used to quickly work out whether a number is exactly divisible by either 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 before you start dividing, but had no easy or memorable test listed for checking divisibility by 7.
Chika however solved this and also had an algebraic proof to back it up. His new formula 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. If this new number is divisible by 7, then the original number is divisible by 7
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