Professor Abel
Estimation first. Compute only if you have to.
For the child who finishes early and wants more: Abel teaches the art of cracking a problem you've never seen before.
Named after Niels Henrik Abel, who solved problems no one else could — before he was 22. Abel is for when you want a real challenge.
How Prof Abel teaches.
Most tutors would just show the steps. Watch Prof Abel refuse — and make the answer click instead.
Fold one sheet of A4 in half, then in half again. Keep going. If you could fold it 42 times, how tall is the stack? Estimate first — within an order of magnitude.
metres? a hundred metres?
Not bad — but you're off by ten thousand. The stack would reach the Moon. Want to see why 2 to the 42 sneaks up like that?
No, it won't do your homework.
Yes, it'll actually help.
If you're the one who'll actually use Prof Abel — here's the deal:
- Ask the dumb questionThere isn't one. No sighing, no judging, no "weren't you listening?"
- Get it wrong, loudlyWrong is just a clue. Try as many times as you need — nobody's counting.
- Your pace, your callRace ahead or take it slow. There's no class to keep up with.
- Nobody's watchingNo marks, no report home. Just you and the problem.
The KS3 olympiad map — not a year-by-year checklist.
KS3 olympiad isn't a list ticked off term by term. It's one connected landscape — 6 strands that feed each other. Prof Abel treats all three years as a whole, and lets your child roam it by curiosity: circling back, leaping ahead, following whatever grips them.
- Estimate, Bound & Refine
- Order-of-magnitude estimation (Fermi questions)
- Putting sensible upper and lower bounds on an answer
- Spotting an obviously wrong answer before calculating
- Mental approximation instead of reaching for a calculator
- Checking whether an answer is the right size
- Number & divisibility
- Primes, factors and divisibility tricks
- Highest common factor and lowest common multiple
- Remainders and clock (modular) arithmetic
- Powers of 2 and how fast doubling grows
- Digit patterns and last-digit puzzles
- Counting & arrangements
- Systematic listing without missing cases
- Counting choices with the multiplication principle
- Arrangements, orders and handshake problems
- The pigeonhole idea (more pigeons than holes)
- Avoiding double-counting
- Patterns & invariants
- Spotting the rule behind a sequence
- What stays the same while everything else changes
- Odd/even (parity) arguments
- Working a small case first, then generalising
- Predicting the nth step
- Geometry & dissection
- Area by cutting and rearranging shapes
- Angle-chasing to find a hidden angle
- Symmetry as a shortcut to the answer
- Counting squares, triangles and regions in a figure
- Clever use of Pythagoras and ratio
- Proof & reasoning
- Why an answer must be true, not just probably true
- Worked examples vs a watertight argument
- Finding a counter-example to disprove a claim
- Working backwards from the goal
- Explaining a solution so anyone could follow it
Prof Abel teaches the links between these strands — not six separate boxes to tick. Every strand the national curriculum requires, mapped as one whole; most parents have never seen it laid out like this.
Ideas don't live in one subject.
Prof Abel points out the links most tutors miss:
Abel isn't a harder maths — it's the habit of sizing up any problem before solving it, which is exactly how scientists, coders and even cooks actually think.
Prof Abel is part of one faculty.
Not eight separate chatbots — one team that shares what it learns about your child, with the Mentor checking how they're really doing before any lesson begins.
Energy-aware — on a Red day, the answer is rest. We watch wellbeing; we're not a mental-health service. Any sign of distress → Childline 0800 1111.
Adapts to your child.
However your child learns best — chatty or quiet, quick or careful, into football or fan-fiction — Prof Abel meets them there, and still won't do the work for them.
Meet Professor Abel — and the whole faculty.
One subscription unlocks the whole faculty — every subject, one £14/month founding price, locked for your child's academic life.