Mission

Why

Whether a child finds out they’re good at mathematics still depends far too much on which school they land in and what their parents can pay for. The ability is spread evenly. The teaching isn’t.

What we do

We connect students in underserved schools across Delhi NCR with volunteer tutors who are genuinely good at mathematics and want to teach it. Undergraduates, senior school students, and teachers who’d rather spend a Saturday on a hard problem than almost anything else.

Where we start

Classes 6 to 8, early enough that a student hasn’t yet decided what sort of person they are. We work along the route they’ll actually travel: NMTC first, building toward IOQM and RMO from Class 8.

Most students never hear that pathway exists until Class 10 or 11, by which point they’ve lost years they can’t get back.

We are now extending our teaching up to Class 12. Once that is in place, students will be able to stay with us from their first olympiad through IOQM, RMO and beyond.

What we’re after

Some of our students will qualify for things. Most won’t, and that’s fine. What we want is for them to stop treating mathematics as something other people are good at, and start treating a problem they can’t immediately solve as something worth sitting with.

What’s next

Both of these are plans. Neither has started yet, and each depends on funding.

Olympiad access: if we are funded, we plan to pay the IOQM registration fee for every student of ours who wants to sit it, and to help with registration and with travel on exam day. We also plan to support students who qualify for RMO and later stages with travel and materials. The fee is small, but it is often the first thing that stops a student from taking the exam at all.

Research: once it is funded, we plan to start Fermat Lab. It will search for counterexamples to open conjectures in combinatorics and publish every attempt, including the failures. Results small enough to check by hand will become problems for our students.

Who we are

Ishaan and Akshat met in Class 9. What connected them first wasn’t mathematics, it was economics, the two of them working through ideas neither had been taught yet, just because it was interesting.

Mathematics came later, and differently for each of them. Ishaan found his footing in it by the end of Class 11 and hasn’t left it since, he’s now preparing for ISI and CMI. Akshat’s path ran through the rest of high school and reached a turning point at the Lodha Genius Programme’s residential apprenticeship at Ashoka University in Class 11, sitting in on graduate lectures in number theory as a high schooler and realizing, for the first time, how much of the subject a school syllabus simply doesn’t show you. He was invited back the following year as a research apprentice and teaching assistant, working under Professor Shanta Laishram at the Indian Statistical Institute while preparing his own students for international tournaments.

Neither of them found any of this early, or easily. Akshat didn’t know these pathways existed at all until Class 12, and by then there was barely time left, he cleared IOQM that same year, but a family emergency kept him from sitting the next stage, and there was no second attempt. Ishaan didn’t hear about a competition beyond the SOF olympiads he’d done in school until he stood in front of it himself, in that same room at Ashoka.

Project Fermat exists because of that gap, not despite it. Both of them know exactly what it costs to find mathematics late and mostly by accident, and what it might have looked like if someone had simply told them sooner. That’s what they’re trying to be for the students who come through this program, the person who tells them sooner.