On this page you will find the results and comments of all the brave souls who took part in the 2022 Honorary Mental Math Challenge and the 2021 Honorary Mental Math Challenge.
For honorary memory results, visit this page instead.
Some important notes:
- Although they mimic the format of real CMSA championships, “honorary challenges” are done purely for fun and practice. Results are based on self-reports from participants. All that being said, we have no good reason to doubt the validity of any of the results below.
- Every honorary challenge comes with a deadline for sending us your results and for being included in the scoreboard. You’re of course encouraged to send us your results during those periods. However, if you miss the deadline, or if you want to attempt to do better than you previously did, it will always be possible for you to download the latest challenges and test yourself. The latest editions of our Honorary Memory Challenge and our Honorary Mental Math Challenge will always remain accessible online. You can use those documents. Or you can use our memory or mental math training tools and sample disciplines. So if at some point in the future you want to try something and post your results, you’re very welcome to do so as a comment at the bottom of this page, as a post in this Facebook group or anywhere else you prefer.
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Full results of the 2023 Honorary Mental Math Challenge
Many thanks and congratulations to all participants of the long-delayed online 2023 Honorary Mental Math Challenge!
Top 5 best overall reported scores in mental math were by
- 14 years old Mako Inokawa in Tokyo, Japan
- 12 years old Kaloyan Danielov Geshev in Sofia, Bulgaria
- 9 years old Manaka Imanishi in Tokyo, Japan
- 61 years old Marc Larocque in Québec, Canada
- 49 years old Domenico Mancuso in Italy
And now for all the even more difficult optional challenges results! Unless otherwise specified, all results were achieved in only 5 minutes.
* When the mention “with Regular section rules” appears, it means the participant was allowed to note down his calculations while solving the problems.
Advanced multiplications [example: 623 x 749 = 466 627]
- 49.5 by Kaloyan Danielov Geshev
- 19.5 (20/21) by Michelangelo Sabatini
- 18/18 by Andrea Attili
- 16.5 (18/21) by Giovanni Battista Scambia
- 14.5 (15/16) by Domenico Mancuso
- With Regular section rules: 25.5 (27/30) by Silvio Di Fabio
Squaring [example: 412 square = 169 744]
- 2-digit numbers 15/15 , 3-digit numbers 15/15, 4-digit numbers 14/14 by Kaloyan Danielov Geshev
- 2-digit numbers 15/15, 3-digit numbers 15/15, 4-digit numbers 8/9 by Domenico Mancuso
- 2-digit numbers 15/15, 3-digit numbers 10/14 by Andrea Attili
- 2-digit numbers 15/15, 3-digit numbers 13/15, 4-digit numbers 1/1 by Giovanni Battista Scambia
- 2-digit numbers 15/15, 3-digit numbers 15/15 by Michelangelo Sabatini
Calendar calculations [example: 12 December 1696 = Wednesday]
- 77/77 in 1 minute by Kaloyan Danielov Geshev
- 27.5 (28/29) in 5 minutes by Domenico Mancuso
- 7.5 (8/9) in 1 minute and 38 (40/44) in 5 minute by Michelangelo Sabatini
- 6/6 in 1 minute and 23.5 (25/28) in 5 minute by Andrea Attili
Square roots [example √431,093 = 656.57672]
- 1912 points by Kaloyan Danielov Geshev
- 70 points by Michelangelo Sabatini
- 64 points by Domenico Mancuso
- 40 points by Andrea Attili
Unpredictable calculations [example: (((((784/8) = 49) x 3) + 8) / 5) = 31]
- 60/60 in 4 min by Kaloyan Danielov Geshev
- 41.5 (43/46) by Marc Larocque
- 30.5 (31/32) by Andrea Attili
- 21.5 (22/23) by Michelangelo Sabatini
- With Regular section rules: 27 (28/30) by Silvio Di Fabio
Insane multiplications [example 51,837,062 x 88,901,573 = 4,608,396,351,498,530]
- 2/2 by Michelangelo Sabatini
- 1 by Joshua Olayanju
- 1 by Domenico Mancuso
- With Regular section rules: 2/2 by Silvio Di Fabio
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Some additional comments by participants:
From Giovanni Battista Scambia from Italy :
Fun competition! Thanks!
From 9 years old Manaka Imanishi from Tokyo, Japan :
Hi, it’s my first challenge from Japan!! My teacher of “SoroTouch”, that is mental calculation training method, recommended me to participate this mental challenge. I like calculation and mathematics very much. Thank you for this opportunity.
From 9 years old Haruki Fujita from Tokyo, Japan :
It was more difficult than I expected, but it was fun and I’m glad I was able to participate!
From 14 years old Mako Inokawa from Tokyo, Japan :
This is my first time participating from Japan! Kaloyan’s mother taught me about this challenge. I belong to a new mental calculation organization in Japan called Sorotouch Suidobashi School, and am currently training for 5 minutes a day. Thank you for this opportunity!
From 11 years old Takamichi Inoka from Tokyo, Japan :
This is my first time participating from Tokyo, Japan! I’m a member of a new mental calculation organization in Japan called Sorotouch Suidobashi School. I’m so glad to participate in the World Mental Calculation Competition.
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Full results of the 2022 Honorary Mental Math Challenge
Thanks and congratulations to all 356 participants of the 2022 Honorary Mental Math Challenge!
The vast majority of those 356 participants are young people in India working with the Genius Kid organization. We also saw participants from France, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, Spain, Russia, Germany, Bulgaria and of course Canada.
Thanks to the Genius Kid organization for getting so many young kids and teenagers to participate in our event. Also thanks to Daniel Timms and Marc Larocque for their help.
The very best reported results in the Advanced section were from:
- Aditya Kumar in Mumbai, India.
- Jean Béland in Grangy, Canada.
- 15 years old Dhwani Dharmesh Patel in Athwaline, Surat, India.
- 11 years old Kaloyan Danielov Geshev in Sofia, Bulgaria.
- 13 years old Kanishk Maulik Shah in Athwalines, India.
The best reported results among Juniors (13 to 17 years old) in the Advanced section were from:
- Dhwani Dharmesh Patel in Athwaline, Surat, India.
- Kanishk Maulik Shah in Athwalines, India.
- Kaede Kodachi in Japan.
- Aaadi Ankit Shanghvi in Athwalines, India.
- Evan Barbin in France.
The best reported results among Kids (12 years old and under) in the Advanced section were from:
- Kaloyan Danielov Geshev in Sofia, Bulgaria.
- Neil Keyur Patel in Ahmedabad, India.
- Priyansh Kiritbhai Parmar in Ahmedabad, India.
- Arham Shrujal Shah in Mumbai, India.
- Aaryan Nitin Shukla in Nashik, India.
Special mention also to 16 years Hridyanshu in Delhi, India who participated in the Regular section. Although we couldn’t directly compare his scores to others, it’s noteworthy that he correctly solved no less than 178 multiplications in 5 minutes. That’s more than any other participant in this challenge.
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Top 30 honorary results from all participants in the Advanced section
When we’re organizing an official in-person championship, we use a “Championship Points” (CP) system to determine the final ranking. We don’t always bother calculating CP for an honorary challenge such as this one, but we chose to do so here for the best 30 reported results in the Advanced section. Here they are.
* For details about the working of our Championship Points system, check the “Final Ranking Calculation” section of this page.
Use the zoom-in function on your computer (usually Ctrl +/-) for better clarity. Reading on your cellphone might be more difficult.
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2022 honorary results from all participants in the Advanced section
I wasn’t sure how best to organize the presentation of so many results. The order in which participants appear is partly arbitrary. It’s loosely based on the regions where participants are living. Scoreboards with the mention “(results from “independent” participants)” are for participants who sent us their results independently from any institution. Scoreboards with the mention “(results from “Genius Kid” participants)” are for participants affiliated with the Genius Kid organization.
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2022 honorary results from all participants in the Regular section
Participants in the Regular section face all the same problems as those in the Advanced section, but they are allowed to write down their calculations. One would think that this would be the most crowded and popular section, but it wasn’t the case for this particular event. Only two participants chose it. Both happen to be extremely skilled.
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2022 honorary results from participants in the Beginner section
Participants in the Beginner section face simpler problems than those in the Regular and Advanced sections. Many Genius Kid participants took part in both the Advanced and the Beginner sections. It seemed to make sense to separate the results from “real beginners” from those who took part in both sections. The scoreboards below will start by listing only the results from participants who only attempted the problems from the Beginner section.
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2022 honorary results from Advanced participants who also attempted the Beginner problems
The scoreboards below are from participants who took part in both the Beginner section and the Advanced section. Some of those may be “real” beginners. Others may be highly skilled. Since the Beginner challenges are never more than 2 pages long, some participants were apparently able to finish every single problem before the 5-minute timer was up.
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2022 honorary results to all optional challenges
Optional challenges are difficult and unusual problems provided to those who want to tackle them. The results of those optional challenges never affect the final ranking of any in-person or honorary event.
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– *For the results where I wrote down “?” as a final score, it’s because I wasn’t sure whether the number of good answers reported by the participants referred to the number of correct digits, or the number of fully correct 8-digit answers.
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Some additional comments from participants
From Aditya Kumar in Mumbai, India:
Myself Aditya kumar, age 22, from patna bihar, a naval cadet at training ship chanakya, Indian maritime university, navi mumbai, one of the oldest maritime Institute in India. I am known as a human calculator in my campus and in my friends group. I have a record in India book of records for calculating exponential power of 3 up to 19 times in one minute. I have also participated in Cmsa honorary mental math challenge 2021 in which I got 4th best position overall, participated in MSO 2020 London, as I am addicted to calculations, just world is coming back to normal, and hoping for the many upcoming events and in doing calculations. I never felt tired. In this last 12 months I have practiced more on division , square root and calendar dates, just preparing for memoriad and mental calculation world Cup.
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From 16 years old Hridyanshu from Delhi, India
I will start from the beginning itself. I have been involved in mental mathematics and mind sports challenges since 7 years of age. Having participated in mental mathematics, scrabble championships and puzzles, I have always loved games that give my brain a good exercise. I have won the major state and national abacus and mental mathematics competitions and just got inducted a few days ago in the ‘India Book of Records’ for writing the most factorials in one minute.
For the past five months, I have tried to practice three hours daily for this event. What particularly intrigued me was the fact that this event was online with no invigilator. This further motivated me in fact to go ahead and give my best. I would like to thank the organizing team for clearing my queries. I think the deadline postponement personally helped me to give final touches to my performance.
I am slightly happy and slightly disappointed with my performance because the time I had put for this challenge just made me want to do better in additions and divisions sections, though now I believe they went good. Multiplication is just awesome! I have always loved it and that is the reason why I thoroughly enjoyed the optional challenges I attempted. They went extremely well according to the practice I did for them. In future, I hope to do even better.
I am really grateful to CMSA to let foreign nationals participate in such events when due to COVID, most events have been postponed or cancelled. Thoroughly enjoyed this! If I am allowed, then I would really visit Canada to participate in the national mental mathematics event.
[Hridyanshu did all of his challenges the same day in a very short period of time, with very little rest in between each attempt. A mathematic teacher named Vivek Kumar supervised all his attempts.]
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From Pietro Rossi from Rome, Italy:
I have made all my attempts on the excel file, definitely not the fastest way to play but I prefer to avoid printing if it is not really necessary.
[April 9] the Italian championship of mental calculation took place here in Roma, I have been practicing mental calculation for a month and I still have a lot to learn …
Thanks for your work, I’m Pietro from Rome.
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Full results of the 2021 Honorary Mental Math Challenge
Thanks and congratulations to everyone who participated! Congratulations to Hua Wei Chan in Alberta, Canada, for managing the best results overall. Congratulations to Jean Béland in Granby, Canada, for his second place. Congratulations to 10 years old Kaloyan Danielov Geshev for his third place and for his amazing demonstration a few days ago at Bulgaria’s Got Talent. Scroll down for more “fun facts” about the participants and for a link to a video of young Kaloyan showing his skills on tv.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want some comments of yours to be published or if there’s some mistake that you would like to see corrected.
Also thanks to Marc Larocque and Daniel Timms for their help promoting the event!
Use the zoom-in function on your computer (usually Ctrl +/-) for better clarity. Reading on your cellphone will probably be more difficult.
- Participants are listed in first name alphabetical order.
- Click here for all the details about all the events and scoring rules.
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(Note that no real “beginners” have tried the honorary challenge so far. The three participants above tried the “Beginner section” for fun and as some sort of warm-up, but they also took part in the Regular or Advanced section.)
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Some additional fun facts:
- All the Canadians listed above have previously also participated in our official in-person championships. Hua Wei Chan also won the last edition in 2019, while Jean Beland got second place in 2019 and first place during our first championship in 2018. If you’re curious, you can click on the links to check how their current results compare with their past official results.
- Aditya Kumar is a cadet at the T. S. CHANAKYA Indian Maritime University in Mumbai, India. He holds national records for mental calculations and he also participated in the 2020 MSO Mental Calculations Online.
- Daniel Timms from the UK runs the very helpful worldmentalcalculation.com instructional website. He managed some of the best results at the squaring, square roots and calendar calculations optional challenges.
- Jean Beland, James Ward, Silvio Di Fabio and Francis Blondin will (probably) also take part in the upcoming Honorary Memory Challenge.
- 10-years-old Kaloyan Danielov Geshev didn’t just get the third-best results here. He also got fifth place at the 2019 Junior Mental Calculation World Cup in Germany and 7th place at the 2020 MSO Mental Calculations Online. His amazing Bulgaria’s Got Talent audition was uploaded on Youtube just a few days ago! More than 160,000 views so far. You can click on the picture below if you want to watch it.
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Some additional commentaries:
From James Ward from the United Kingdom:
James left some much-appreciated posts on the Art of Memory forum about this event and his participation. You can click here to read them. Румяна Гешева also left some friendly comments in Bulgarian in the same thread about Kaloyan’s performance.
From Daniel Timms from the United Kingdom:
“Overall I’m pretty pleased with how I did given that I haven’t done much competition-focused training for ages, just some for experiments or to prepare for workshops!
Good job on setting a suitable variety and difficulty of questions. The squaring event is new, and actually more interesting than straightforward multiplication as there are shortcuts, although the 2-digit ones were entirely from memory. Calendar dates for 5 minutes is super tiring! I could probably have beaten my score but preferred a third round of square numbers.
Looking forward to seeing the results next week!”
[Daniel also made some much-appreciated posts about the event on his World Mental Calculation website and Facebook page.]
From Evan Barbin from France:
“Merci pour ce super défi cérébral! J’attends avec impatience les prochaines éditions.”
From Francis Blondin from Montreal, Canada:
“Overall I’m quite happy about this event and about the level of participation ( : I’m also relatively happy with my own scores. I did everything on the computer. Most calculations were done mentally, but I did note down my sub-results for additions and multiplications, hence me being in the “Regular” instead of the “Advanced” section. Although recently nearly all of my “training time” has been taken up by other activities, I did try a few very short mental math drills during the days before my attempts. Not much, but still enough to greatly reduce my average number of mistakes. I also relearned how to do calendar calculations and was very pleasantly surprised with my 79 out of 80 scores in 5 minutes. I honestly first thought that I had made some mistake while setting up the timer and that I had kept going for too long. But then I tried again unofficially and got about the same results.
At some points during the next few months, I’m hoping to take some time to do some more mental math reading and practicing, and then try everything again in the “Advanced” category and try all the optional challenges. When that will be done, I’ll post my new results as a comment at the bottom of this page. I think I can manage some not great but very decent or at least ok results at squaring and everything else. Would also be cool to manage just 1 of those “insane multiplications” completely mentally, even if very slowly. If you combine some ok mental math skills with a well-practiced system for memorizing numbers, it should be possible right?”