Maths World Champion Returns to Millfield

Yuka Machino joined Millfield Prep School in 2014 as a Year 6 pupil and excelled in her academics. She competed in many international Mathematics Olympiads throughout her time at Millfield and is now studying at the world's best university (as described by Forbes), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Yuka was crowned the world’s top female mathematician during her time at Millfield, after gaining gold in the International Mathematics Olympiad for a second year in a row. She also won three gold medals at the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad and represented Japan in an international Informatics (Coding) competition, getting a silver medal in her first attempt in this discipline.

Yuka returned to Millfield for the first time since she left three years ago in 2021. She’s caught up with some teachers, walked around campus and visited some of her favourite spots from her time here.

“I loved going back to the swimming pool, it helped me to remember how big and nice it was there. I’ve visited the music department, my physics teacher and Dr Brooks, my old maths teacher. He was my maths teacher for four years (Year 10 – Upper Sixth). I also saw Mr Dale, the Director of Swimming; he hasn’t changed, as fun and smiley as ever!”

Yuka is spending the summer doing research at the University of Cambridge, before heading back to MIT via a brief stop-off at home in Japan.

“I’m working in a lab in Cambridge, who are already collaborating with my lab back in MIT. I’m working around AI research which is Maths related. It’s creating an AI system which judges the interestingness of maths problems. The hope is that by doing that, you’ll be able to filter out the training data of maths problems so the AI systems can learn more effectively from the maths problems. It’s related to what I studied during my degree but I’ve been working more in AI than in maths.”

“I’ve worked in a lab called the Computational Cognitive Science Lab, where we worked on understanding how humans think and trying to model that computationally. This is also related to AI, as there are a lot of things lacking in AI currently that humans are better at doing. So that lab is motivated more by how to do the more human things that we do naturally with AI. It’s similar in the sense that humans can judge the interestingness of maths problems better than AI can.”

“I wanted to come back to the UK because I haven’t been here for three years, so that was one of the reasons I wanted to come back and do research here this summer. The professor from my lab in MIT recommended me to the professor in Cambridge which allowed me to come here and study. There’s lots of friends that I made from the Maths Olympiads that I was doing during my time at Millfield who are now at Cambridge, so it will be lovely to see them there. I go to Cambridge to start my research tomorrow and go on until mid-August.”

“I’ve been involved in teaching Maths Olympiads in more recent years at MIT. I’m going on to do a masters at MIT next year where I’ll be studying Computer Science. I haven’t yet decided exactly what my research will be around, but having worked in the two labs recently, the Computational Cognitive Science and one which was more to do with language processing, I think my research will revolve around those areas. I took a class last semester which was about multi-agent communication, working around how you communicate with someone evolves over time, how depending on the understanding you share with the person you communicate with, the communication is different (etc. inside jokes/ways to refer to things). How ways in which we communicate and what we say make sense in some contexts but wouldn’t make sense in others. Trying to understand that better computationally, as while we may understand those contexts and dynamics in which we communicate, AI doesn’t."

“While I’ve been studying Maths. I always had in mind that I wanted to work in something more directly related to humans. My next steps would most likely be going to Grad School, I wanted to study Computer Science at grad school, but people are telling me that the papers I say are interesting are more cognitive science and linguistics, so maybe I’ll have to look into that.”

“One of my favourite parts of MIT has been the fact that I’ve been given the opportunity to travel abroad to teach Maths Olympiads. I’ve taught in Ghana, South Africa and Rwanda, and that’s been such an interesting experience. It’s very different as the students don’t have as much Olympiad experience before attending the sessions that I teach. It’s great as I can go through with them some Olympiad techniques and tricks that students from the US or the UK would definitely already know before attending the classes, when you see their eyes sparkling when they learn those tricks for the first time and realise how cool they are, that’s absolutely amazing. This usually takes place during my winter breaks; I’ll spend two weeks teaching in one of the countries before heading back to MIT. In Ghana I taught in Accra, in Rwanda it was Kigali, South Africa was at Stellenbosch University. In Rwanda and Ghana we travel round to schools and do bigger talks to bigger groups of students. I do that with peers from MIT (three students).”

“I’ve been swimming on my own recreationally at MIT, which offers a great break away from my studies. With the busyness of travelling, I haven’t been able to keep up with my piano playing. The swimming really helps to clear my head away from the studies and allows me to keep a healthy schedule, making sure I don’t study all the time. That’s a skill that I learned at Millfield, having hobbies and other things that I did before starting at MIT really helped me there. It’s really hard to pick up new things when you get to MIT as there’s just so much going on, so I was really grateful that I’d built the ability to balance that while at Millfield.”

“I was helped at Millfield to find that balance between Maths and Swimming, my teachers and coaches were always incredibly supportive in that process. Dr Brooks was allowing me to do whichever Maths I needed to do while I was here. I was invited to Maths camps after I started scoring well in the Olympiads at Millfield, and it was then that I learned that there was this whole world of Maths Olympiads, that’s where it all started.”

“It was certainly a big help when transitioning to MIT (boarding at Millfield). Boarding, being away from home, figuring out how to spend your day and how to fit things in when people aren’t telling you what to do with your days. That level of independence is great preparation for what is expected of you at University. When I was at Millfield, I would plan my schedule at weekends, so I would say at this time I’m going to practise piano, so then I need to fit in brunch here to leave time in the afternoon to practise for Olympiads.”

“Even though I stopped swimming competitively in Year 10, swimming is one of the things I remember the most is the swimming. Swimming at Millfield was so much fun, but it was hard! Knowing that I could manage within a competitive swimming environment gave the me confidence to take on a lot of the challenges that I now face at MIT. The swimming pool is nicer here than at MIT! The MIT pool is still pretty good though!”

“Most of my time in Boston I spend on campus. I was so busy during my first two years with classes so I didn’t have too much time to go out and explore. But I like going to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We also sometimes go out to get food, I love going to Chinatown. I also sometimes go to take classes at Harvard as well, they count as credits for MIT which is very useful. I often take humanities classes there, as we are required to take 8 maths classes and 8 humanities classes to graduate. Last year I took Intro to Psychology and Intro to African Studies. I do enjoy most of the classes we get to do, and it’s nice to go to Harvard and talk to Humanities majors and get a different way as we don’t have any at MIT! They also teach very differently at Harvard than MIT so that offers a really interesting change. You can’t talk about a Maths equation for two hours so the more conversational seminars can be fun!”

“I have been publishing work while at MIT. I did some research in the summer of my first and second year which were both published. They tend to be more theoretical computer science that uses maths I’ve learned to interpret computer science problems. These pieces have been presented at conferences in Italy and Japan. I have another one coming up in Amsterdam which is a CogSci Conference.”