a girl doing homework If your child has a logical approach; if he isn't put off by the sheer size of a task, and has the ability to break it down into small, manageable chunks, then he is likely to have mathematical intelligence in spades. But how do you spot his maths gift?

Extract taken from Could Do Better by Phil Beadle, published by Corgi Books

Case studies

One of the results of the singular nature of the language of maths is that there are children who are utterly fluent in it, but who struggle to master other subjects.

Paul, for instance, is a student who could work out the most complex algebraic solution, but could barely write his own name.

One of the strangest things I have come across as a teacher was the case of Belinda. Belinda was the Head of Maths' star pupil. She was so advanced in the subject that she would have to sit special papers in it all on her own. The Head of Maths once described her as the most gifted student she had seen in 30 years.

Belinda's brilliance crossed over into her work in English, for which I was her teacher, in a very strange way. Her choice of words was nothing special, her ideas about the texts we studied were barely above average, but her punctuation was an art form.

She approached sentence construction as if it were a mathematical problem to be solved. They would be of such perfect rationalised complexity that they would have caused an Oxford don to drop his bacon sandwich.

The aptitudes possessed by a child who has high logical/mathematical intelligence can be used to investigate other areas. Remember, it's not just about sums, it's about logic, sequences, shapes and patterns, too.

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Is your child a mathematical genius?

Case studies