The HSC maths tests are three months away.

If this calculation is enough to give you the shivers, relax. Fairfax Media has some tips from a boy who just aced the world's hardest high school maths quiz.

Sixteen-year-old Sydney student Seyoon Ragavan​ scored 96.88 per cent and a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad competition in Thailand this month.

Here he shares his advice for building speed, thinking creatively and shutting out distractions so it is "just you versus the paper".

1.  Attack the problems "as a baby would".

"You just try doing it," he says. "You eventually find a pattern and then you flesh that pattern out into a final answer."

Sounds simple but do not expect the approach to work straight away.

"A lot of practice has gone into getting better at not thinking about any of the technicalities and just playing around with the problem."

2. Focus on the maths, not your classmates.

"It's not about the result; it's not about how others do."

Seyoon made sure to spend time on his own the day before the competition to repeat this message to himself.

"Drilling that into my head really made me a lot calmer when the exams started."

3. Start small.

"Try to find generic constructions for smaller cases. You can eventually work towards the idea that lies behind the final construction."

4. Sleep.

Seyoon slept up to nine hours a night before the Olympiad competition.

5. Go back over old problems.

"It's often good once you've done a problem to break it down and analyse what were the key steps involved in getting to this. Make sure that's really drilled into your head so the next time it comes up you can do it twice as fast."

6. Chill.

"At the end of the day, this is not the be all and end all," Seyoon says.

Stressing will only hurt your performance, whether that's in General Maths or an international competition.

To get a sense of Seyoon-level mathematics, see below his response to the first Olympiad question.

Pages S1-S5 are the solution and R1-R4 are the working.

Question 1

We say that a finite set S of points in the plane is balanced if, for any two different points A and B in S, there is a point C in S such that AC = BC. We say that S is centre-free if for any three different points A, B, and C in S, there is no point P in S such that PA = PB = PC.

(a) Show that for all integers n≥3, there exists a balanced set consisting of n points.

(b) Determine all integers n≥3 for which there exists a balanced centre-free set consisting of n points. 

Maths test