Seville Student Ranks 11th Globally in International Mental Math Competition

Javier Prieto González is nine years old, in third grade at San Francisco de Paula, an international school in Seville. A few months ago, he spent hours training his mind to do something most of us stopped trying in middle school: calculate complex math problems faster than almost anyone on Earth.

Last month, the results came back from SuperTMatik, a global mental math competition organized by Eudactia. Among 40,392 students competing from around the world, Javier placed 11th. That puts him in the top one percent globally—a ranking that would be remarkable for a university student, let alone a child still learning to write in cursive.

He was not alone. Twenty-two students from his school entered the competition across different grade levels. Sixteen of them landed in the global top one percent. Inés Bacete, in Year 1, placed 90th out of 11,286 competitors in her age group. Adríán Estrada, also in Year 3 like Javier, came in 49th among 40,392. Carlos Pena in Year 4 ranked 56th out of 50,004. Carlos Mariscal in Year 5 placed 167th among 83,322. The school's collective performance suggests something systematic is happening in those classrooms.

María Jesús Ramos Sotillo teaches mathematics at the school and coordinated the students' participation. She explains that SuperTMatik is not really about speed arithmetic—not about who can add fastest. The competition tests something deeper: whether students can develop strategies for calculation, understand how numbers work at a fundamental level, and apply mathematical logic under pressure without making mistakes. Errors cost points. Time matters. Precision matters more.

The training was intensive. Students spent months building mental stamina, learning to recognize patterns in equations, practicing algorithms until they became reflexive. Ramos Sotillo describes the process as developing "strategies of calculation and profound comprehension of number and mathematical algorithms." The payoff, she argues, extends far beyond a trophy. Students who learn to manipulate numbers with speed and accuracy develop a kind of intellectual agility that will serve them when they encounter real problems—engineering challenges, financial decisions, scientific reasoning—where mathematical thinking is a tool, not a test.

What struck Ramos Sotillo most was the motivation. These were nine- and ten-year-olds who chose to spend their free time training mental math. They pushed themselves. They competed not just against the world, but against their own previous attempts. The school created an environment where that kind of effort felt worthwhile, where winning mattered but trying harder mattered more.

SuperTMatik runs these competitions every year, drawing thousands of students from dozens of countries. It is designed to promote mental calculation and numerical reasoning at a time when calculators are everywhere and most schools have moved away from teaching these skills. The competition assumes that something is lost when we outsource our thinking to machines—that there is value in training the mind to see the structure of numbers, to hold multiple operations in working memory, to move through a problem with precision and speed.

For Javier and his classmates, the rankings are now official. They are among the best in the world at something most people never try to be good at. Whether that matters in the long run depends on what comes next—whether the school sustains this culture of mathematical rigor, whether these students carry the habits of precision and strategy into other domains, whether they remember, years from now, that they once trained their minds to do something difficult and succeeded.