Inside the First Two Years of National Math Stars

I’ll never forget our first Welcome Weekend for National Math Stars. For three days, 66 young math geniuses (and their parents) played strategy games; tinkered with play-dough, pentominoes, and micro:bits; solved tricky puzzles; ate way too much sugar; and built lifelong friendships. Bringing these families together in person for the first time, we saw the magic we’d created together – and were inspired to keep building.

In July 2023, I joined the philanthropic foundation Carina Initiatives as an entrepreneur-in-residence with a simple but ambitious mission: find and support the United States’ top math talent.

Why take on this mission? For me, it’s both personal and impact-driven. First, the personal: I know firsthand how hard it can be for parents and schools to meet the needs of kids with extraordinary mathematical ability. I skipped three full grades growing up and accelerated an additional three years in mathematics – and I still spent most math classes bored. My parents invested a great deal of time in research and advocacy. Still, they struggled to find many of the great advanced courses, camps, and competitions that serve talented kids. I’m excited to ensure young Stars today can access those opportunities.

Second, the impact: Kids with extraordinary mathematical ability are in every community and come from every background. Research shows that these kids have an outsized chance of becoming inventors, researchers, and leaders, but only if their talents are nurtured. By ensuring that happens, we can grow the pool of brilliant minds that are equipped to tackle the big challenges facing the world.

In this post, I’ll share what we learned in our first year on this mission. Part Two, coming next week, will dive into our scale-up that began in year two, and the questions we’re grappling with heading into year three.

Find and support 1-in-1,000 talents

Our mission is to ensure mathematically extraordinary students from all communities have the resources they need to reach the frontiers of math and science.

Here’s how it works:

• We identify talent early, starting with 2nd- and 3rd-graders who score in the top 2% of their peers on math assessments.
• All these families are given award medals and invited to apply. Our admissions process then looks for “1 in 1,000” mathematical ability, using further logical and spatial reasoning assessments. Selected Stars can receive up to 10 years and $100,000+ worth of advising, mentorship, and direct financial support (depending on need) to unlock the full ecosystem of advanced STEM classes, clubs, camps, and competitions.
• We integrate Stars and their parents into a vibrant community where they share educational experiences and cheer each other on.

The results are not just stronger math skills. They are confidence, collaboration, and a sense of identity as a mathematician.

Build only what’s missing

When first sketching out the idea for National Math Stars, I resisted the urge to build everything myself. Instead, I went on a listening tour. I visited summer math camps, read research papers, spoke with parents of profoundly gifted children, and connected with leaders of programs like Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, Johns Hopkins CTY, Davidson Young Scholars, Art of Problem Solving, and of course, Global Talent Fund.

The lesson was clear: there was already a rich “advanced math ecosystem” of classes and curricula, camps, and competitions. These organizations do excellent work — better than we could hope to replicate. There was no need to use our limited capacity building anything others had already built well.

Instead, we focus on what’s missing: the guidance, mentorship, funding, and encouragement needed to connect talented kids to existing opportunities. We find the students who might not otherwise know about or be able to access the advanced math ecosystem, and bring them inside. We set up a program to train professional mentors for students in our highest-touch program, because no existing organization trained math mentors in the way we needed. But most of the time, our role is connector and supporter, not creator.

Launch and learn

We launched the pilot cohort after just a few months of setup, even though we had only a rough sketch of what National Math Stars would look like. With help from the Partnership for LA Schools and Art of Problem Solving, we invited 12 families of promising young mathematicians to take part. We told them the program was just for the year, and we were purposely vague about what it included.

Those families — now fondly known as our “Protostars” — taught us invaluable lessons.

We discovered that traditional tutoring wasn’t what our students needed. Far from struggling with classes, they wanted to stretch their minds. So we shifted toward math mentoring, working with creative teachers who emphasized problem-solving and student-driven exploration.

We also learned that leaving funding requests entirely open-ended created big disparities. Families with higher incomes and more experience in the education system asked for far more than families with fewer resources — even when the latter needed the support more. To fix this, we gave each family a defined annual budget and paired them with an advisor to help them identify the best opportunities.

Not every experiment worked. Without a formal admissions process, we ended up with some Stars who weren’t a strong fit for the program. Two years on, only 75% of our Protostars are still with the program. But these early teething problems were much easier to address with a group of 12. Thanks largely to what we learned working with them, we have 98% retention as our first larger group of 61 enters its second year.

The ‘Protostars’ continue to inform our program design. They are our oldest students, so the first to hit major milestones: middle school, AP exams, etc. They are fully engaged as co-designers of the program, so they are patient with our mistakes and vocal with their feedback and suggestions.

The first year taught us what mattered most: find our niche, avoid reinventing the wheel, and be brave enough to start before we felt ready.

But once the pilot wrapped, we faced even bigger questions. How do you scale from a dozen families to thousands? How do you reach extraordinary math talent in every corner of the US?

I’ll dive into those questions next week!